


The People Underneath the Stones

by orphan_account



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Magic, Eventual Johnlock, Fae & Fairies, Gen, M/M, NOT Macro/Micro, Slow Burn, Teenlock
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-12-29
Updated: 2014-02-21
Packaged: 2018-01-06 13:25:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 23,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1107384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Seventeen year-old John Watson can remember, clear as day, listening to his grandfather spin tales about pretty much everything imaginable as he visited his seaside homestead as a kid. From talking china to magic blankets to the exquisite love story of a bird and a fish, he was always enchanted. The one thing that he never imagined, though, was finding one of them to be true.<br/>When he meets Sherlock Holmes, and is shown a world very far from his own, he is spellbound.<br/>Updates weekends(ish). Rating will eventually rise.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue: Grandfather

**Author's Note:**

> Take note: Rating will rise as the story drags on!  
> Also: I will try to update weekly, with chapters reaching your screens each weekend. You can count on having a new chapter every Saturday with an 78% accuracy rate.

“Now, what do know of the people living under the garden stones?” Grandfather asked.

“But Granddad,” John laughed, “it’s not possible for people to live under stones! They don’t fit!”

“Oh, but these people do,” said Grandfather, with a new glint in his warm eyes, his weathered face alight. “They’re tiny, so small that they can fit. And they’re just like you and me, too; tiny little people who live under the petunias and the lilacs. But their arms and legs are as thin as pencils and can snap just as easily, so you must be careful around them. Just like you should be with your mother’s vases, and you mind that, John!… Anyway, on their backs, are the most fragile, silvery wings you’ve ever seen, which make them able to fly…”

Grandfather loved to tell stories such as these. And he really seemed to enjoy it, as any great storyteller does. When grandfather opened his mouth to spin new tale, his words flowed like water from a crystal-clear stream, never stopping but carrying with it entire worlds; and people, too. He spoke with a soft, ever enthusiastic voice that made everything else seem melancholy and gloomy in comparison, talking of his made-up lands in the way that a proud father speaks of his children.

When he spoke, grandfather illustrated scenes with his hands and his voice, which was pure expression and wonder. He came alive; and with him, the stories.

Dragons and green creatures with teeth like knives and skin like blown glass; princesses and butterflies and kindly elves that guarded the underside of the rickety old staircase leading up to the attic. There were talking animals and leaf-creatures, and rebellious fish that fell in love with birds. There were cats with leathery wings and men who blew fire from their mouths. There were mice and painting-people who jumped out of their frames, and the delightful tale of the frog who was turned into a prince.

But most of all, grandfather loved to tell of the small, winged people who lived under the garden beds. It was undoubtfully his favorite story, out of all of the wonderful things he told.

Grandfather had a voice and an aura that inexplicably enthralled anyone who was nearby enough to hear. And he told his stories whenever he could.

He told them at night, next to a roaring fire that added the occasional _crackle-snap_ to his words. He told them at breakfast, when famous kings and queens would dine at the table next to them – the two worlds sharing nothing but the delicious smell of cooking bacon as Grandfather’s words washed over the room and made their food all the more pleasing. He told them in the middle of the day, when John was playing with his toy doctor set, patching up his teddy bears and hugging them tight to his chest so as to show them how much he cared. But when he heard the older man’s voice call him, he would drop everything he was holding (except the bear) and stumble over on tottering legs, sitting Indian-style at his Grandfather’s feet.

Even at the tender age of five, John had had an almost unsationable thirst for adventure; loved closing his eyes and flying away with the sound of a story, letting it lead him to strange lands that were inhabited by strange, unreal, _beautiful_ creatures that he couldn’t even begin to comprehend.

He visited a poor servant girl who learned to weave dreams into blankets; a small prince who could turn into a dove and soar high above the castle walls and into the clouds; a family of china dishes that could laugh and sing and talk, and even dance; and so, so many other wonderful places from Grandfather’s imagination. He was transported out of the reality of the small, seaside cottage and into beautiful places that seemed beyond the description of anyone - other than his Granddad, of course.

But the best thing by far about Grandfather’s stories was that he told all of them as if they were real. They spilled out from his lips not as woven tales but as actual events that he had witnessed unfolding and decided to commit to memory. It didn’t matter that he failed to partake in any of the tales; for it was a sure thing that he had been there to watch. His voice never trembled and not one detail was ever out of place.

John was enchanted.

⁎*⁎*❉*⁎*⁎

They had moved to Grandfather’s cottage most unexpectedly; Mummy had come trundling down the stairs sometime late into the night with a suitcase in one hand and a tissue grasped firmly in her other, half-dressed and, John had noted interestedly, with only one shoe.

She shook John awake gently, flicking on his bedroom light, whispering “Wake up, John, c’mon baby, we gotta go,” in a voice that wasn’t right, somehow. John had sensed something was wrong at dinner, when Daddy wasn’t home yet, and he had asked her about it; but she had been on her phone and hadn’t heard. He had figured that it was important and decided not to disturb her.

But now she was waking him while it was still dark, and she sounded like she was about to cry.

“Mummy, whassa matter? What are you doing?”

“We’re going to take a trip to Granddad’s for a while, sweetie. I’m going to go and do something very important, and you’re going to have to look after Harry, okay? Just for a little while, I promise, and, anyway, I know you love seeing Granddad, right? Okay? So you need to get up and pack your stuff, sweetheart, while I go and get Harry.”

He was still rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, and she was halfway out the door when he asked:

“Is Daddy coming?”

And Mummy turned away, and said very quietly, “I don’t think so, sweetheart.” He almost didn’t hear the words because the shadows that they beckoned soon came to absorb them, leaving John to sit and wonder and cry a little bit, even though he wasn’t entirely sure why at first.

⁎*⁎*❉*⁎*⁎

Grandfather’s tales might as well been real, the way he told them.

Mummy had tried to catch the old man waver or slip-up in his stories more times than John could count, but Grandfather never did. Not one thing was ever mis-said or forgotten, no matter how many times he repeated the same tale. Everything was always perfectly aligned and revealed, a feat that John knew, even as a young boy, was amazing.

Sometimes, Grandfather would seem to snap out of a dream-filled reverie, and he would smile and chuckle about “nothing in particular”. If he decided to spin out a story at such a time, he would, after he finished, swear that it had actually happened.

He would say it with a wistful, wise look on his face, and John would feel proud of his Granddad, who had visited knights and courageous warriors; known beautiful and warrior princesses; met mysterious, slightly ominous dwarves and had come back to spread the word of their mischievous doings (which were almost as carefully planned as their beards were braided), their worrisome plots and their pinched features, set upon faces disgruntled at being vanquished yet again.

Whenever Grandfather would make such a claim, Mummy would sigh, and her face would pull into a tight, forced smile. Her eyes would go cold and somber like empty rooms of cold, dark stone – and that was how John knew that it upset her when Granddad talked like that. Sometimes, the boy would pull on her blouse in an attempt to comfort her, or say something like “It’s okay, Mummy,” even though he did not know exactly what was making her so sad.

Once, John had reached for his toy stethoscope, and he had tried to listen to her heart. He had heard that it was what made you feel things. It was what made you happy, or sad, or jealous or angry. And if Mummy was feeling sad, maybe there was something wrong with her heart.

But Mummy had only pushed him gently away, and her eyes had still looked like those empty rooms. John didn’t like it went people eyes went funny like that; it was never their whole face, just the eyes. It was like they were wearing a mask.

Monsters lived in dark, empty rooms, and they hid behind masks, too.

“Does your heart hurt, Mummy?” John had asked. He had hoped not, because then monsters might crawl out of her head and take her heart, too.

She hadn’t answered his question, and John had been thinking that maybe her eyes weren’t empty rooms at all, maybe they were dark, deep tunnels that were completely filled with trolls and nasty things that gobbled up people like tasty treats. And then she spoke.

“Hun, Granddad’s aren’t true. You know that, right? He makes them up.” She had said, but what did that have to do with her heart? And John had been confused, nonetheless.

"But he says so, Mummy! Granddad saw dragons and tiny people and he… he even saw nasty goblins… like the ones that live in your eyes, Mummy, he told me!”

John had expected Mummy to be worried about the naughty creatures in her head, or to tell her son that she was glad that he had seen them, or better yet to tell him that he was right; Grandpa was no liar. Instead, she had looked exactly like she had on the day that Daddy hadn’t come home from work; when the ruckus of his bumbling old truck had stopped being a constant in their lives.

At least the goblins and trolls had mostly gone from her eyes. Instead, they were brown again, like hot-chocolate and soft dirt and crisp, autumn days.

Secretly, John wished that Grandfather would tell stories about his Dad. Then, maybe, he would come home again.

⁎*⁎*❉*⁎*⁎

After he told her about the monsters in her eyes, Mummy had taken to him to a special doctor. She wasn’t the kind of doctor that he wanted to be, because she only _talked_ to people. But she said that she fixed them too, and that she did it just by being their friend.

John had thought that was marvelous. When he told her so, she smiled. Then she had asked him all sorts of questions about Grandfather, and his stories, and all the monsters that he said were lurking in the dark places. He had talked and talked, and she had nodded her head at all the right times, never interrupted and even complimented him. When they were done she gave him a lolly and a smile, and he got to play with the trains outside her office while she and his Mummy talked.

They whispered things like “coping mechanism” and “don’t worry” and Mummy smiled at him when they got back to the car and said he had done a great job, that this was hard on all of them, and that she’d like to read him a story if he’d like. Just like Granddad. (Who Mummy had only told him was “very sick” and “forgetful” and that maybe not everything he said was true, even if he thought so.)

From then on, his Grandfather made sure to only tell him how real the stories were when Mummy was gone.

⁎*⁎*❉*⁎*⁎

John’s grandfather passed away when he was six.

The grown-ups wouldn’t really talk about it around him, but he heard snatches of conversation that usually involved the words “peaceful” and “lucky” and “a good life” and “his time”. He had heard the big man, the one with the squeaky gloves and the fuzzy chin, say “tumor”.

John hadn’t known exactly what it meant, but he’d supposed it had something to do with your heart, or maybe the monsters in your head. He thought that maybe Granddad had gotten too sad, and his heart had hurt like Mummy’s, and that maybe it had stopped working properly. When his toy cars had gotten too old, sometimes they had broken or stopped running, and then John couldn’t get them to work again. He thought maybe it was like that. Grandfather was old, and the man had said that he had a “tumor”. Maybe that was why Granddad didn’t move anymore, and why he felt so cold.

⁎*⁎*❉*⁎*⁎

Harriet had held his hand at the funeral, and they watched as everyone bowed their heads to the rain-soaked ground and the tall man in the front talked about Grandfather.

John watched the stones at his feet, trying to distract himself from the uncomfortable suit caging his body, and the tie strangling his neck. He had fiddled with it a thousand times already, and it had only managed to get tighter. He didn’t know why he had to wear it; if this whole event was supposed to be for Grandfather, surely he could wear his blue jeans - Granddad wouldn’t have wanted him to be uncomfortable, would he? But the suit had been a request from on high, and John didn’t want to trouble his mother any more than she already was (the monsters in her eyes were back.)

He watched the rain drip, drip, drip onto the smooth sandstone by the water as more people got up to talk.

Drip, drip, drip. The waves crashed against the shore to his right, stirred up and made slightly frightening by the storm.

Drip, drip, drip. His feet were getting cold; why wouldn’t Mummy let him wear his boots? They worked for puddles better than whatever these things he'd been forced into did.

Drip, drip, drip. The rain was so beautiful, the way it splashed onto the rocks.

And then –

Something came out of the rock pile on his left, venturing just far enough to see what is going on in front of him. It immediately drew John’s attention.

He was small, so small, only about seven or eight inches high. He looked like one of Harry’s dolls. His hair was jet-black and very shiny, tangled atop his head in a mass of curls that seems to belong there, somehow. His body was long and lean, covered by what seemed to be just a simple, very plain shirt and long pants, which were tucked into small black boots.

John could only see his back from where he leans out, trying to see the happenings before him, but he was entranced by what he saw. On the creature's back - stemming out of twin slits in the shirt that covers his torso - were wings. Wings like a dragonfly’s. They looked like the surface of a summer lake, captured perfectly in a picture. Long and transparent-blue, spread out to half of their full length, they rested against his back. They were each about as long as half his body, and seemed to dance and shimmer with light.

John gasped; he couldn’t help it.

When the sound escaped his lips, the tiny creature stiffened, his wings snapping down against his back and his shoulders straightening. Slowly, ever so slowly, he turned towards the sound.

John’s eyes were met with a different pair, and they took his breath away. They were the exact color of the wings on the creature’s back, and just as enchanting. They seemed to pierce his very soul, and he couldn’t look away.

It took him a second, but he realized that the eyes belonged to a creature whom looked to be at least five years older than him; he had a boy’s face. He was very handsome, and his features lay claim to that extreme beauty, standing out upon his pale skin. There were his captivating eyes, and then there were his cupid-bow lips, full and red. His cheekbones were sculpted, giving him an almost alien quality. It was like he didn’t belong to this world.

He _didn’t_.

The boy looked at John for a long time, the expression on his face one of pure interest; he wasn’t scared or worried at all. He gave John a small smile, which the other boy could not return, too amazed with the microscopic person in front of him.

The creature only smiled wider, and then drew back, returning to his clump of stones.

Drip, drip, drip.


	2. Faerie Rings

_He wha tills the fairies' green_

_Nae luck again shall hae :_

 

_And he wha spills the fairies' ring_

_Betide him want and wae._

_For weirdless days and weary nights_

_Are his till his deein' day._

 

_But he wha gaes by the fairy ring,_

_Nae dule nor pine shall see,_

_And he wha cleans the fairy ring_

_An easy death shall dee._

 

_-          A Scottish rhyme; origin. 1800s_

 

 

Denying the fact that the eastern coast of Cornwall was appallingly and startlingly beautiful would be like saying that a home-cooked boot tasted just as good as a home-cooked meal.

Basically, it wasn’t true.

It was kind of funny that an opinion could be proven false, but it was almost universally accepted.

It was like the extremely common belief that it wasn’t “okay” to come in at half-past three on a Thursday morning, dead drunk, when you had promised your only son and his only sister that you wouldn’t turn back to the bottle again.

 It wasn’t “okay” to be a single mother burdened with the task of supporting two teenagers and not even seem to try.

It wasn’t okay to stumble in with sick on your shoes, not even able to stand up straight, and knock over all the pot plants as you make your clumsy way over to the kitchen. John had been able to hear her all the way from his room, and the noise that had woken him with a start had been loud enough to wake a sleeping bull.

His mother came in with glazed eyes in the early hours of the day, before even the sun had awoken, even though she had left eight and a half hours earlier to “see Lisa, be back soon, honey”. It was hard for John to understand why she did things like this, sometimes. All of the time, really. His mother hadn’t answered her phone (they’d thought it was out of battery at first), hadn’t told them where she was really going (“ _Lisa’s”_ ) and had left her children worrying and fretting and almost calling the police all night. They’d called Lisa after trying their mum, only to find that she hadn’t made any plans to see Ms. Watson that evening, are you sure that’s what she said?

Before they both finally turned in, to a restless and agonizing sleep, they’d exchanged a worried glance and a silence so palpable that John had gulped, looking up at the ceiling.

As if it could give him the answers that he longed for.

The day was hard on all of them; but John had hoped that they could’ve gotten through it together, like a family should try to. Ms. Watson had been getting more and more withdrawn, saddened, and quiet all week. He had tried to talk to her the day before (“It’s going to be hard, Mum, I know, but you need to listen to me - can you please not… start again? With the drinking. Harry and I, we’re here. For you. Promise me you won’t. Promise me.” She had promised.) but here they were again, back to square one.

He fell asleep still searching upwards for an explanation, only giving in to his pillow’s calls and somnolent beckonings because he just couldn’t keep his eyes open any longer.

It wasn’t okay.

It wasn’t fine. Sure, it was better than it’d been when the wound was fresh, years and years in the past; but it would never be okay. His mother would never be fine. She did this on every anniversary of her husband’s death, and probably would do so for a long time yet, no matter what John tried to do to help.

John Watson had coped. He’d done his best, he’d gotten through. Even when it seemed that everyone was gone, and even when he’d had to tuck himself in and tell his own stories to get to sleep. Late at night, when mum had turned to the bottle and Harry had ran up to her own room with tears in her eyes, he would open up the window and crawl into bed and tell himself about the fish and the bird, and the girl who wove dreams, and the elves guarding the stairs.

And the people underneath the stones.

They helped him through, the stories. He’d grown up with them and he continued to grow with them through every summer at the cottage and every school year in London. They sang him to sleep and wiped the frown off his face. They dried his tears.

In the stories, everything was different. Better. He wasn’t John Watson, the sad kid staring out his window; he was John Watson, _Dragon Slayer_ ; John Watson, _Fearless Prince_ ; John Watson, _Savior_ ; _Hero_ ; _Doctor_ ; _Genius_ ; John Watson, _Loved_.

His stories gave him something that many people find hard to get enough of – _love_. And so his heart stayed pure and innocent, and it blossomed even as the hearts of those around him shivered in the cold and withered into blackened, broken pieces of what they should’ve been.

There’s a saying: _Memento Mori_ , or “remember death”. But how could one ever forget?

His mother surely didn’t. And while Harriet had done better, it wasn’t as if she had come out unscathed.

 

John had not gone back to sleep after his mother came in. He had cleaned her up and placed her gently into her bed, with a glass of water and some Asprin on the table beside her face, which looked so very peaceful. After he was done, he’d gone to Harry’s room to tell her that mum had finally showed; only to find Harriet on the floor beside her own bed with an empty bottle of scotch in her hand. Her eyes were closed in her own liquor-induced stupor.

John had let out a lengthy sigh, pinching the bridge of his nose and looking up again. And then he’d gone through the entire process for a second time, tucking his older sister into bed with water and pills and maybe a little bit of a curse. They were almost the same age, born just ten months apart, and even though Harry wasn’t that much older than him, it still felt wrong to be tucking his older sister into bed.

Everything felt wrong.

He wasn’t tired from his late night so much as numbly disappointed, and he knew that it would be impossible to shut his eyes once more and retire to his bed. So he had stretched his arms above his head, pulling up his soft grey sleep shirt to step under the shower’s warm embrace. The hot water stroked his skin with its massaging drumbeats, and for a while, among the steam and the heat, he let himself forget. He just let go, and closed his eyes to the music of the trickle of water down his back.

All too soon he had to get out, and he fluffed his hair with an off-white towel and turned off the tap. He didn’t bother to brush it, and pulled on a soft undershirt and his favorite jumper, along with some blue jeans.

He had made up his mind in the shower: he was going for a walk.

He pulled on his good boots, for he intended to hike along the rocky cliff-faces that edged the grass and wood outside of the home. They framed the ocean waters magnificently – it made him feel as if he were in a different world. And John needed to get away. He really did.

A note to Harry was left next to the water glass, reading only, _Mum’s home. Gone for a walk. Not sure when I’ll be back. – J_.

 

John walked over to the door, and after staring at the ornate brass handle for a moment, walked out, letting his feet take him wherever they would. Only stopping to glance back behind him, he ran his fingers over the tall grass, and the peeling white fence that lined the property. The moon lit up the way with a modest, warm glow, casting shadows that seemed to dance and twinkle with the promise of adventure. He pushed silently through the gate and made his way to where the lush grass merged with the hawthorn trees that liked to grow in the up-crop.

The boy's short frame wandered on, skin illuminated and paled in the moonlight. The air outside was chilly at this time of night, the grass cold and the rocks frosted. But it wasn't a problem. Beckoning to him, the grounds were fresh and welcoming. And he happily obliged to their summons.

John turned his eyes toward the rocks. On the edge of the cliffs, they looked menacing and dark. But he made his way towards them. He slowed when he came to the trees, but found a gap in their growth and continued on. Those trees, almost alive the way that they were lit up, swayed dangerously. But the steady pace of his legs was rhythmical and determined. He trampled weeds and ducked under logs. Most of the plants that were there had wasted away, or cracked and crumbled from age.

Dead branches slowly started to thin, and suddenly opened up to a large meadowed cliff, filled with flowers lit up with the glow of the stars. The moon shined bright, and John pushed himself forward, drifting through the thick grass and the blossoms, not thinking at all. Now, at least, he was away from the house where so much had gone wrong… All that mattered at this moment was making his way through the icy night air, while the moon was high, and the grass danced to the whistling of the wind in the trees. He planted himself on a rock overlooking the water, the crash of waves a symphony for his thoughts.

When the sun finally came up behind him, its rays stretching to twinkle upon the water in front, he was thinking it’d be best to go back. The chatter of birds awakening was joined with a sadness that had latched onto him and was slowly growing in his chest.

The problem with being so loyal and readily forgiving was that – inevitably –you were let down much, much harder than you’d have been otherwise.

He got up and stretched, legs feeling like some kind of living stone, and started on the trek back from the cliff, and the water, and the serene blue that had started to overtake the memory night.

John went a ways into the woods, passing trees and stumps and clusters of green leafy bushes. He let himself think about nothing; nothing but the path in front. After a while, though, he realized that he must have made a wrong turn, or done something else of that sort; for the way _towards_ the cliff had not taken nearly as long as it was taking to _return_. It was only his second time taking the journey, and it was quite easy to get yourself lost in the trees and rocks, of course. They clumped together and shadowed each other. The landmarks that led the way could be easily lost among the larger ones that might loom over the traveler.

As he continued to make his way, John started to feel more and more certain of his own displacement; and as he came to this realization, his head hung lower and his shoulders started to slump more and more, until finally he sat down on the dead stump of what looked to have once been an old hawthorn tree. He held his head in his hands, rubbing his forehead with his thumbs in slow circles.

He was lost. And in broad daylight, too.

Almost immediately after he sat down, though, John knew that something more was wrong.

He couldn’t name it, exactly – in fact, he wasn’t even able to pinpoint quite how he knew – but there was a faint sense of something _not right_. In some secondary field of awareness, he felt it. Hot and pulsing. Alive. And not good.

He straightened his back abruptly, peeking through the gaps in his fingers. A shiver ran down his spine, starting at his neck and not stopping until every bone had shaken.

He looked right, left, up and down. He looked all around him. But nothing was there.

No, he could _feel it_. There had to be.

Out of nowhere, he felt a suffocating pressure on his legs. It felt as though they were being squeezed through a ring about as big as one that you might find on your finger; they were being pushed inwards with a force that made his vision go white. When it started to come back, still flickering bright white, he looked down at his knees.

Roots of some kind, thick and jungle-green, had wrapped their way all the way up to his thighs. They were slick and shiny, and a dusting of freshly dug earth dripped off of their tightly wound vines. Here and there, a large toad stool could be seen sprouting from the rope, off-white and faintly speckled. The roots were squeezing his legs so hard that he nearly passed out.

He tried to struggle, but he couldn’t even feel his feet. He pulled at them with his upper body instead, fingers latching on and pulling with all of his might. But they wouldn’t be stopped, and his efforts didn’t even seem to be registered.

As John continued to stare, he realized that the vines were moving upwards on his legs. They were doing so with a slow, malevolent steadiness, and he watched in horror as they crept up and up. He tried to cry out, but found that he couldn’t get a word out due to his gasping. He didn’t understand what was happening. Where had the vines come from? How had he not noticed them?

_How were they moving?_

It was as if they were alive… _No_ , John thought, _they really were alive._  

This is what he had felt, when he had sat down. This was the power that he had felt pulsing beneath his feet.

The vines continued to press in, and this time when he looked down, John really did let out a cry of alarm. He stopped struggling. A deep, throaty yell escaped him. He bit his lips, and tears started to leak from his eyes.

And then he was wrenched roughly upwards.

The green ropes had crept their way up to his torso, almost stifling his breathing. But they weren’t as tight as they were on his legs, and John had a fleeting thought that this thing, whatever it was, wanted him alive.

Ridiculous.

He was forced into a standing position, and he craned his neck to look back at the stump he had been resting on. Only, there was no stump, not anymore; there was a gaping hole in the ground, out of which stretched the vines that held onto his body. He couldn’t see anything but grass-colored slime and blackness.

The ropes flew up to his fingertips with amazing speed, in stark contrast to the slow procession that they had moved at earlier. They stretched his arms until it hurt, his wingspan spread out until his limbs were nearly being pulled from their sockets.

John couldn’t form a coherent thought within the blinding pain, and instead let out a shrill, deafening scream.

The ropes wrapped themselves around his arms now, winding in tight spirals at a blinding speed. Soon, he couldn’t move at all. He looked straight ahead of him, neck held into position by yet more green roots. And then he felt them hardening around him.

It crept up from his feet, and passed over his thighs and his torso. Finally, when the sensation made its way to his arms, he watched it progress.

The roots were turning into bark. Earthy brown, rough, splintery tree bark.

He started to slip out of consciousness. The sheer unbelievability of it all, along with exhaustion and crushing agony had finally gotten to his head. His vision started to blur and his body started to fall slack within its living prison.

Had he fell unconscious any earlier, he would have missed it. But as it happened, John was a soldier at heart, even then. He had an extremely high tolerance for pain, and had managed to keep his awareness for quite a long time. Much longer than any of the others that had befallen the ghastly roots, in fact. So it was just as he was finally his grasp on what was happening to him, maybe even as he was dying, that he watched a thin, tall figure run out of the trees in front of him.

He couldn’t make out any details, and saw only the recognizable shapes and colors; but it was a person, no doubt. There was something behind him, too, a shimmering in the air that he couldn’t make out – but this would not matter until later.

He watched as the figure drew a large, gleaming sword and raised it above his head, running for John. He knew it was a weapon because of how it reflected the light.

The figure, who had fluffy black hair and large ears, reached John in a second flat. (Was that even possible? How far away had he been?) In even less time, he was hacking at what had been the stump. The ropes let out a hissing noise much like the sound of a fire being flushed with water, and they started to slacken, just a little bit.

The slicing continued for an indeterminable amount of time, the figure moving as quick as lightning as the vines started to shoot out to grab him, too. He danced out of their path like a top, spinning and ducking, and with every swing he loosened their grip on John just a little bit more. The bark that had been hardening like cement around his body started to crack and fall away.

Finally, the figure threw his sword down and drew something from his pocket. He poured it into his hand and raised it to his lips, shouting something that John couldn’t understand, and blew it into the heart of the vines. There was a flash of blue light, and the roots slackened completely as the brightly colored sparks flew up their lengths.

John fell to the ground, and just before he slipped out of awareness, the figure was suddenly above him. He looked up just as his lids fell and his vision cut out.

He gazed briefly into a pair of sparkling, translucent blue eyes.

And then he dreamt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just want to say thank you for all of the wonderful feedback I got for the prologue. I really am truly flattered. Thank you tons to anyone who gave kudos, bookmarked, commented, or even just read it.  
> ilu (*≧ω≦)ﾉ  
> I hope that this chapter was everything you wanted it to be.  
> Thanks again, guys.


	3. Sherlock Holmes

**_Earlier That Day_ **

_At Holmes Manor_

“Oh, for God’s sake, Sherlock,” he said, running his fingers through his auburn hair. The man stood in front of a very odd assortment of items; among them a seemingly gigantic toothbrush, a mobile phone battery, a push pin, a coil of copper wire, a fifty pence piece, two sugar packets, crudely made, plastic black stilettos, a snail shell, a button camera, a box of cigarettes, and a plethora of what looked like jelly beans. Everything was, of course, made for someone much bigger than he, and they dwarfed him drastically. The items had to belong to a giant, and the man standing next to them had to be no bigger than a ruler in comparison.

“You’ve gained three ounces since I saw you last, brother dear. I take it that the diet hasn’t been sticking,” Sherlock said lightly. He was draped over his desk, head resting in a pile of old leather-bound books, unruly curls tumbling over the yellow pages. He hadn’t so much as glanced up when Mycroft walked in, bright eyes staring up at the ceiling instead. His brother looked at him with distaste.

“As poor as your attempts at humor are, right now is not the time for it. I saw you approximately twenty minutes ago. That was when I informed you that you needed to get dressed for the interview. Needless to say, you aren’t.”

“You know, Mycroft,” Sherlock drawled, disregarding him and looking at his fingernails, “cake isn’t love. And even if it were, you’ve said it yourself: ‘ _caring is not an advantage_ ,” he stretched the last part, saying it with a stuffy, arrogant tone (which was almost always what he heard when the elder Holmes brother opened up his mouth.)

Mycroft didn’t react to the jab, choosing instead to look around the room in revulsion.

“You know what I’ve told you about taking things from the filth,” he said, crinkling his nose. “Goodness knows what awful diseases are on all of this…”

“And it’s twenty- _two_ minutes ago, actually. That was when you last called on me,” uttered Sherlock in a monotone, ignoring Mycroft’s other statement entirely.

 

 “Sherlock Holmes, _where_ do you think you’re going?”

“I can’t even be in the same room him. He’s an idiot, just like every last one of his colleagues! Stupid, unobservant –“ His voice rose in pitch as he spoke, putting his hands to his temples dramatically. Sherlock’s eyes were wide and angry, his hair a mess atop his head. He somehow managed to look even more catlike, even more Byronesque when he was like this; almost like a piece of living stone that had gotten up one day and decided to have itself a temper tantrum.

He had been running down one of the hallways off the main foyer, tearing past old portraits and creamy wallpaper as if being chased. He had left his suit jacket somewhere behind him when he had ripped it unceremoniously from his shoulders and flung it over his head. Every now and again he had stopped to knock something over – a vase, a wardrobe; anything and everything that happened to be extremely large and obnoxiously noisy – as he made his way to the east end of the house, where the manor opened up to a wilderness of rocky up-crop and glittering waves. He had just gotten there, next to the French doors that led to his destination, when he had felt someone appear behind him. Now he was turned around, facing the source of the voice that had just reached his ears.

“-I cannot even bear to think how the rest of society actually puts up with these –“

“And the rest of society wonders how I put up with _you_. It is your responsibility –“

“My _damn_ _responsibility_ –“

“Well, you could’ve at least kept your mouth shut –“

“Oh, like it’s _my_ fault if he’s cheating on her with the nursemaid!”

“These interviews could decide your future –“

“I’ve told you already, I’m not interested in wasting my time with formalities!”

“You have to go to school,” Mycroft answered commandingly, glaring at his younger brother. This argument had obviously been had too many times before.

Sherlock’s eyes flashed dangerously. “I don’t need to. I’m smarter than all of them combined and I could probably teach their subjects in my sleep,” he announced.

“I’m aware. You do, however, need to learn how to interact with people without storming out of the room in a fuss! And since you’ve gotten yourself thrown out of yet another school, I’m running out of options,” Mycroft snapped back.

“It wasn’t my fault.”

“Of course it wasn’t. It never is. Sherlock,” Mycroft said, expression still perfectly blank and controlled, though looking more strained by the minute, “I am not going to argue with you like this. You’re being a child.”

“No, they’re the children. Their IQs can testify,” he growled in response.

“Stop it. Stop it right now. I don’t know what to do anymore. I am doing my best, but I cannot babysit you like this all the time. You won’t cooperate with anything, you sit around and waste your massively exasperating intellect chain-smoking tobacco; do you know why nobody’s done that for centuries?  Because it’s immature and stupid and something that _humans_ do, Sherlock. You’re not a human, no matter how many of their ghastly toys you steal, and you need to grow up. I am seriously contemplating sending you to Capinello after all.”

Capinello was an underground boarding school in France that had attracted his brother’s attention. It was basically impossible to escape from, since it was located under miles of solid earth and had only three official entrance points from aboveground. The school had been used as a threat for as long as Sherlock could remember, since he found the idea of being shipped off there nauseatingly boring. (He had looked it up on his micro-tablet and had been able to find only fourteen possible escape routes; and he would no doubt dry those up quite quickly should he ever be sent there.)

Besides, being sent off somewhere was not something that Sherlock thought he could bear. No matter how much he acted like one, he was not a child. He was thirty-two years old, for God’s sake! (That statement might need a bit of clarification: he was thirty-two years by human measurement. But creatures like Sherlock age half as fast as humans do, and live twice as long; so even though Sherlock had been alive for a long time, he was as mentally and physically mature as a human teenager.

Well, perhaps more mentally mature; his mother had had him tested, and Sherlock was far more intelligent than any human to ever have walked the planet. It was a slightly smaller feat in the Faerie Regions, where most inhabitants were already much more clever than average Homo sapiens, but an achievement all the same.)

“You can send me anywhere you like, Mycroft. I’ll still have to deal with the same ignorant, pitiful meat-suits that continue to make life on this Earth a sickeningly dull experience,” he sniffed back, feigning indifference. Oh well, Sherlock thought, even if he was shipped away, he’d still find a way to toy with whatever poor bastard was put in charge of him.

And before Mycroft could say another word, he was out the door to his left, wings spread and gleaming in the sunlight. He zoomed into the trees, and was gone.

Mycroft rubbed his forehead. _And now to deal with the house master in the foyer._

⁎*⁎*❉*⁎*⁎

_**Present** _

When John woke up, the first thing that he noted was the searing pain that he felt in his temples. It was as if someone was sawing the top part of his head off with a pair of scissors, and it took more than a few seconds for him to regain his vision amongst the pounding inside his ears.

The second thing that he noticed was the gigantic pair of eyes looking down at him, only a few millimeters away from his own.

“Argh!” John said, very eloquently, automatically wrenching his head upwards from where it had been lying against the ground. This turned out to be a bad decision, because his skull smacked right into that of whoever the eyes belonged to.

“You have a thick skull,” said a low voice, sounding somewhat peeved and coming from much farther away this time.

John sat up again – he’d been forced down with the impact – rubbing his forehead. He put one head up to his crown, trying to rub it comfortingly, and looked for the source of the noise.

He found it sitting with its knees pulled up to its chest, rubbing its own hairline frustratedly. He was right across from where John was sitting, Indian-style, in the tall grass.

The eyes had belonged to a face that took John’s breath away. The boy had sharply defined cheekbones, which were tinged with a rosy blush, as if he had just ran a mile. He was glancing at John with an undisguisable curiosity, through those almost inhuman eyes that had stared down at him only moments before. His mouth was a perfectly pink cherub’s bow and his skin was pale and smooth where it didn’t retain the unmistakable blush. His dark hair was messy and thrown around without a care, not to mention a bit sweaty, but it somehow managed to look tasteful anyway. 

Everything about the boy seemed regal and perfect, as if he could stand in the middle of a hurricane and not be touched. It was as if he was above everything he saw, as if he could maintain his perfect posture while watching everyone else get burned. John was more than a little intimidated, even though the boy looked a bit younger than him. He wasn't smaller, though, so it was difficult to tell; from what John could see, he was probably taller. He had a thin frame and more long, lanky limbs than he seemed to know what to do with.

But right now he didn’t care about what the boy looked like; no, he wanted to know what the hell was going on.

“What the hell?” he voiced, perfectly echoing his own thoughts.

“No, not quite. Though faerie rings could be seen as more than a little bit evil, I suppose.”

“What…?” John asked. ‘Faerie rings’?

The other boy sighed, rolling his eyes. He was quite good at that. At least, he acted like he had a lot of practice with it. “Unimportant.”

John looked around. They were in the middle of a clearing, trees surrounding them on all sides. Here and there was an overgrown bush or a log, and berries sprinkled the ground along with small white flowers. And behind him, a couple meters away…

The tree stump.

All of it came rushing back to him, and John sputtered, looking around for a sign that anything had taken place. It couldn’t have all happened in his head, could it have? He didn’t know what he thought about that. Either way, he was mental; none of that could have actually been real. A tree that comes alive? He’d be locked up as soon as he tried to explain.

But there was something he was forgetting. Something important. Something…

Oh. _Oh_.

“ _You_ ,” John breathed, turning back to the boy. He forgot his headache altogether.

“I assure you, you’re not going insane. The dryad has been placated, for now. But one does have to wonder; haven’t you ever read about the dangers of walking into a faerie ring? Or are you just as horrifically imprudent as the rest of them?”

“A… fairy…” and then John noticed the wings. They were folded neatly against the boy’s back, but stretched out behind his shoulders – long and transparent, silvery-blue like the restless ocean he’d just looked upon. He gasped.

“Yes,” the boy answered, uninterested. “And it’s _faerie_ , not fairy. Completely different. We don’t prance around in sparkly tights, or pay human children for their teeth… Honestly, the things that mankind come up with are appalling. What would I even _do_ with a tooth?”

But John didn’t hear him, too busy thinking back. “You saved me. That was you, with the sword and the powder… You killed the, the _dryad_ , is that what you called it?”

“Yes. It would’ve been tedious to clean up the mess, had I not intervened.”

“What’s a dryad? What did it want? And what _was_ that?”

The other boy looked at him strangely, as if trying to determine whether he was worth answering. Evidently, he decided that he was, because he said:

“ _She_ , not it. Dryads are tree nymphs, and they take care of the forests that they reside in. When they die, their ‘spirits’ remain infused with their tree. Toad-stools grow around them, almost like a natural warning _not to touch_ their burial site,” he raised his eyebrows as he said this. John cleared his throat and looked away. He’d been mush too focused to notice the mushrooms, but there they were, circling right around the stump he’d sat on.

“I’ve done a lot of experiments on them, actually. Most people think that it’s caused by _magic_ or something equally ridiculous… but magic doesn’t work like that. It’s just basic mycology. The _mycelium_ of the fungus sends out little feelers, _hyphae_ , that grow outwards from the spore, producing mushrooms. And so an outer-ring of fungal growths is made… and the inner circles gradually die as they use the resources at the center, so that the circle eventually expands into a recognizable mushroom ring. They usually grow around deceased dryads because of all the nutrients that their carcasses provide.”

The ‘faerie’ said all of this very fast, taking perhaps five breaths in-between facts. By the end, he was grinning at the surprised look on John’s own face.

He hadn’t understood a word.

‘Unfortunately for you,” the boy continued, “that particular nymph was an environmentalist… they’re getting more and more popular these days, what with pollution and what-not… I think she wanted revenge for all the trash being left in her home as of…” he stopped. “Why are you laughing? Did I say something humorous?”

John was giggling furiously, trying to hold in his laughter and failing. “So… you’re telling me… that I was attacked… by an angry tree? Who also happens to be an _environmental activist_?”

The faerie nodded perplexedly. “Yes, I believe that’s what I said.”

“And you don’t find that funny?”

“Well, she’s a dryad…” he trailed off, smiling.

John smiled back, and leaned towards him. “So… faeries are real? My entire life has been a lie? Anything else that I should know about?”

Sherlock blinked. “You’re taking this all very well.”

“Well, let’s just say that it’s not too much of a surprise.”

Sherlock was very interested. Usually, humans brushed off what they saw; even when they did get a glimpse of a fairy, or heard one, or even talked to one, their minds found a way around it. They made excuses for themselves. A draft, the telly, the cat… there was always an explanation. It was why, when the fae had decided to go into hiding, that it’d been so easy to keep their existence quiet. But this boy - this insignificant, ordinary-looking human - had _noticed_.

“Not everything is real. Nymphs, yes. Fae, yes. A couple of other creatures – trolls, dwarves, elves, sprites, brownies, kelpies, gnomes, goblins, ogres, imps, pixies, selkies, merpeople…” Again, the boy stopped at the look on John’s face.

“What?”

“A _couple_?” he asked incredulously.

The boy was about to open his mouth to respond when he heard a clap of thunder from above.

They both looked up, and saw, to their surprise, that there were a bundle of grey clouds moving in, blocking out the sun. They were dark and compact, and it looked like they were bringing a summer storm in with them.

They hadn’t noticed as they’d talked, but the air around them had grown crisper and colder, and the warmth of the sun had been gone for quite some time now. The wind was starting to whistle harder in the trees, blowing around leaves and blades of tall grass.

“Shit,” cursed the other boy, and he looked back at John. “I have to go before the rain comes.”

“Wh –“ started John, but he was cut off.

“You need help getting back, correct?” The boy’s eyes were sharp and bright, and he was obviously very pressed for time.

“Yes, I was lost… _am_ lost,” John corrected.

But the faerie was already standing up. “Give me a moment,” he said, brushing his unruly tresses behind his ears. John noticed that they were fairly large, and pointed. The boy’s hair had covered it up before. 

When he stood, John could see that the boy was, in fact, the taller of the two of them. It did no good that he was so slender, because it made him seem even more towering. Despite this, he looked to be fairly muscular, and had a runner's build - _perfect for flying,_ John decided, as the perplexingly unconventional teenager looked upwards again, and stretched out his wings behind him. 

He was magnificent.

It was picturesque to observe; the storm above, the trees surrounding, and the shimmering wings that flapped like a hummingbird’s. The boy had his chin raised to the sky as his feet left the ground, and he was soon high above the trees. John was staring, breathless, as he bent his knees and then shot up into the sky, wings beating fast and heavy. They were magical. Blue and green and silver, the essence of light. They seemed to flicker as he breathed, giving off a glow that managed to smolder and blaze at the same time. The light caught them and almost makes a rainbow, and the wings look like the wind that they ride on; except it’s been captured, somehow, to be taken out at leisure.

The boy spent perhaps ten seconds above the green canopies, and then flew back down. He shot like a rocket towards the earth, startling leaves and dirt when he landed.

“Your home is that way,” he pointed to a section of the trees, “and it can’t be any more than a fifteen minute walk from here. You’ll see it if you just head straight.”

“Thanks,” said John, still breathless.

“I have to go… forgot about the rain…” the faerie mumbled, mostly to himself.

John shakes his head a little to snap out of it, and then steps forwards.

“Who are you?”

“My name is Sherlock Holmes. And yours is John Watson. No doubt you’d like to get home before the rain as well." 

'Sherlock' looked at him for a moment, the storm shining in his eyes, his dark hair tossed haphazardly around his head. He looked like he belonged in an adventure novel, and if he were, there was no doubt that he'd be the subject of the book - he was enthralling, and amazing, and just looking at him just then made an apprehensive shiver run down John's spine. He was an enigma, and John wanted to figure him out. He wanted to put together all the pieces of his puzzle and find out as much as he could about the astounding, windswept creature in front of him. 

"I would recommend that you start sprinting.”

“How do you –“

But he’s already off, back above the trees, gossamer wings blending in with the clouds as he flies away.

 

John arrives back at the house just as Harry is putting the kettle on. She’s standing over the stove in a camisole and fluffy pajama pants, and her hair is as greasy as her face. She tries to talk to him, apologizing again and again and offering him tea and trying to stop him from sprinting up the stairs to his room. He ignores her, scarcely even glancing her way as she thrusts a teabag into his face.

He immediately strips, and goes to take another shower. He closes his eyes in the warm water. He puts on his comfiest sweat pants and a soft cotton shirt when he’s done.

And after, he goes to his desk to sit down, and watched the rain dribble down the window. He opens it up, relishing in the smell of the shower, and relaxes to the sound. A melody among the trees.

_Sherlock Holmes._


	4. Muffins and Dreams

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My sincerest apologies for the lateness. I was having a writer feeling. Y'know that feeling? The one where you're at your computer and you just _can't_? The world could blow up and you wouldn't be able to put your last words onto that damn word document. That's the feeling.  
>  Anyway, it's here now!

Distance was not something that the Watson family was lacking in.

John used to wonder about it, while he sat at a silent dinner table or when he came home late and started sputtering apologies - only to find that no one had noticed. But he hadn’t realized that they weren’t a “normal” family until he was eight.

And it hadn’t really bothered him since he was twelve and had just accepted things for the way that they were (he’d come in late after rugby practice because he’d had to walk himself home, and then he’d slept outside because nobody had come to the door for the two hours that he’d sat knocking.)

John hadn’t ever alienated himself before, though. He’d always been the one who tried to get everyone closer. After all, he was a doctor at heart; he wanted to fix his family. The difficult part of all that was the fact that he didn’t have all of the pieces. He tried, though. That was the important part, he told himself. The trying. He would feel an all too familiar sinking feeling in his stomach when he failed, but he’d always tried.

Now, not so much.

He wasn’t angry. (Which was what Harry had thought at first.) He was long past anger anyway. And he wasn’t particularly sad either.

He was just done. Done with all of it. He was ready to leave, ready to get away from the house that seemed to be filled only with the carcasses of those who had left before him. He didn’t want to leave everything, mind – he was sure there was something better out there. But he wanted to find it.

Sometimes, he would think about what life would have been like otherwise. If he’d grown up with a breathing father and a proper, fully-conscious mother.  Even if Grandad was still there, he was sure that things would be more alive. The house would be filled with laughter and love instead of the restless spirits and unaware corpses of people who’d just stopped trying. Maybe he and Harry would be getting on better. Maybe Harry wouldn’t have followed in her mother’s footsteps. Maybe he’d be able to have that dog he’d always wanted. Maybe they’d have been a proper family.

Maybe.

Maybe some things were just sealed into their fates.

But now, John was the one pulling away. He wasn’t doing it on purpose – he would never do anything like that if he could help it, no, John was much too selfless. (That was his fatal flaw.)

He’d just finally, maybe, possibly found something to hope for.

 

⁎*⁎*❉*⁎*⁎

 

John thought about Sherlock every day for a week. 

And then another.

And another.

He sat himself down at his desk and spent hours just looking out of his window pane, his head held up with his palms and his eyes slowly tiring and closing, until, just like that, he fell asleep.

He did other things, too. He did, in fact, have a job, something that he’d secured so that he’d have at least some interaction with actual humans. He worked as an intern for the local hospital’s EMTs. The pay wasn’t all that good – it was a only a bit more than nonexistent – but he loved watching the doctors save lives. That was something that he wanted to do too, someday. And anyways, it gave him something to occupy his time.

The first week after The Dryad Mishap - as he had taken to calling it - John spent nearly all of his time outside. He must’ve gone on fifty hikes in the woods between his shifts, and he spent hours and hours sitting on the porch with a book in his hand, hoping.

The second week, Harry came out to talk to him.

She stepped outside, slowly and hesitantly, the second Tuesday after John had met Sherlock. The teenager in question had been swinging on the hanging bench that resided on their porch when she came out with a sad little smile on her face, holding two blueberry muffins as a piece offering. 

“Mind if I join you?”

She had already started to sit down, so John just responded, “Guess not.”

It was quiet for a long time. It wasn’t awkward, though – it was a sad sort of quiet, and both of them were absorbed in their own thoughts. Harry handed him his muffin in silence, and John stared at it.

A bird chirped somewhere, and the wind blew a daisy past John’s nose.

“I’m sorry,” said Harry, keeping her gaze forward.

“I know,” John didn’t turn either.

She tucked a piece of her long, chestnut hair behind her ear. “I wish things were different, I really do… It’s just mum, she… after Grandad, she just….”

“Yeah.” It had always been like this.

“Yeah,” she repeated.

A chipmunk scuttled up the tree to their right, and Harry sat for a few minutes more before taking her leave.

John stayed on the bench until the stars came out. And then he looked up, giving a deep sigh, and wondered why there wasn’t something else up there.

The next few days were spent mostly in his room.

 

⁎*⁎*❉*⁎*⁎

 

The third week. That was when he almost gave up. It was a bright day, not a cloud in the gradient blue sky, and he decided to stop hoping. He opened his window to let the breeze in and to feel the sun on his face as he put away his laundry. He turned on his iPod and listened to his music. The white curtains fluttered freely by the sill, and the air was sweet like cherry candy.

And then there was someone behind him.

He noticed it in the way that you just feel something sometimes – a prickle at the back of your neck, a shiver up your spine – and so he started to turn around slowly, picking up the closest thing to his hands – which happened to be a plastic, YOU PARTICIPATED! rugby trophy – and took a deep breath.

“Do you really enjoy listening to this?”

John dropped the trophy, which landed on the ground with a muffled _thump_.

“What the _fuck_?”

Sherlock was sitting on his bed, his knees pulled up to his chest and his long arms wrapped around them like they were holding a security blanket. His eyes were as bright and piercing as ever, and the rest of him looked as though it had only just escaped a tornado. His dark curls were a whirlwind of swirls that didn’t seem to abide by the laws of physics. He was dressed in black pants and a crinkled white t-shirt, both of them hanging loosely off of his thin frame.

“Christ, don’t do that to people!”

“Hmm?” He responded, raising his eyebrows quizzically. God, did he always act so much better than everyone else?

“Nothing. Nevermind,” John said, catching his breath and rolling his eyes. He picked up the plastic statuette and placed it back on his dresser, walking over to his desk to sit down. Sherlock stayed on his bed, eyes trailing his movements like a wolf would watch his prey. It was slightly unnerving.

John threw himself over the chair, studying the boy on his comforter. He looked just as he had the last time he’d saw him, all pale skin and long limbs. Slightly more put-together, though, even in his current disheveled state. His wings were folded neatly behind him, glowing in the sunlight.

It took John a good few seconds to wrench his eyes away from the amazing gossamer wings, but when he did, Sherlock was still looking at him.

He cleared his throat. “I was starting to think that you were a dream,” he said.

“You dream about me?” asked Sherlock, steadily, and completely seriously.

John blushed. “Jesus, no, I ah, just… I didn’t think I was going to see you again. Thought that the whole thing must’ve just, I don’t know, been in my head. Thought I was going mental.”

Sherlock grunted a noise of acknowledgement.

It was silent for about five seconds too long, and then Sherlock’s eyes flickered over to the iPod, which was still blasting. 

“Can you turn that off? I can’t possibly be expected to make conversation while it drones on in the background.”

John looked at the iPod. Then he looked back at Sherlock. And then he looked at his iPod once more, and then again at Sherlock.

“Are you serious?”

“Yes…” Sherlock said slowly, as if he was a child who hadn’t understood all of the big words he’d used.

“But,” John furrowed his eyebrows, chuckling like he couldn’t believe what he was hearing, “they’re _The Beatles_.”

“I don’t understand how the insect that the band was named after is in any way relevant to me enjoying their music,” Sherlock said monotonously.

John laughed.

“Seriously? You’ve never heard of The Beatles?” He said, getting up to turn down the song. He didn’t turn it off, though, because if Sherlock didn’t like his music he could bloody well stay out of his room.

Plus, it was _The Beatles._

“I quite literally live under a rock, John.”

John laughed harder this time, smiling wide. Sherlock looked taken aback for a moment, and then started to grin too.

“I never got a chance to thank you,” John said, when his chuckles finally ceased. He was still smiling.

Sherlock looked at him, settling back into his blank, unreadable expression. “No need.”

“No, seriously. I don’t know what would’ve happened if you hadn’t come by with your magic dust and your ninja sword. So thanks,” he said, locking eyes with the faerie.

Sherlock accepted the thanks, but he didn’t acknowledge it. He looked at his fingernails.

“A katana, actually.”

“Well, whatever it was, it saved my life.”

Sherlock didn’t respond, and it was silent again. John rearranged himself on the chair so that he could look right at Sherlock while propping up his elbow on the desk.

“So is that what you do?”

“What?” Sherlock asked, pulling his eyes back up to him.

“Save people. Is that what people like you,” he gestured vaguely to Sherlock, “do?”

Sherlock stared.

John stared back. He tried to explain. “Well, like… ghosts haunt old houses, and apparently dryads turn people into trees – what do faeries do?”

“I’m not actually supposed to be interacting with humans at all,” Sherlock said.

A sinking feeling settled in John’s stomach. “So, do you have to go then?”

“Do you want me to go?” Sherlock started to unravel himself.

“No!” John cringed. “I mean, no… I’d like to keep talking to you, if I can.”

“Okay,” he said, settling back down.

John took a deep breath, relieved.

“Question,” he said.

Sherlock motioned for him to continue.

“Aren’t faeries supposed to be small?”

“Sometimes,” Sherlock said. He didn’t elaborate.

Again, silence.

“So how did you know my name?” John was curious.

Sherlock straightened out on the bed, so that he could see the other boy easier. He took a deep breath, much like someone who was preparing to do something extremely tedious. “The same way I know that your father died in a crash when you were young, and your Grandfather died of a brain tumor only a little while after. Your sister drinks, even though you wish she wouldn’t, and that you tell yourself it’s manageable since she’s not nearly as bad as your mother. 

"I know that you go to school in London but come here for breaks because you just want to get away sometimes, and that you broke up with your girlfriend of two years before this past vacation. You thought the relationship was good, but she thought that your heart wasn’t in it. You had no idea, which isn’t surprising. You told your friend Mike about it, but he wasn’t really listening, since his step-sister’s just gotten ill, maybe terminally. He didn’t want to worry you, so he didn’t say anything. 

"You’re still angry about it. You really want a drink, but since your father died after a little too much vodka was put into his system, you haven’t touched the alcohol in the liquor cabinet, which coincidentally isn’t kept locked, because then it would be too hard to get at on the nights when your mother doesn’t even have the energy to be discreet.”

John couldn’t speak.

“And how could you possibly know all that?”

He took another deep breath. “I know that you don’t live here year-round because you don’t have nearly enough person fixtures in your bedroom, and your clothes are all summer items. So it isn’t your house, maybe a summer home? But no, you’re not nearly wealthy enough for that, you would use the money for a good rehabilitation clinic if you were. So how did you get the house? Well, it’s not yours, so a relative. But there are only three people living here. A dead relative, then. Your father? But you wouldn’t stay in a house that your father had lived in. Two dead relatives. Grandparents, then. Grandfather, to be exact; it isn’t nearly lacy enough for an old woman.

“So, two dead relatives. Who wouldn’t have a drinking problem? It seems to run in your family on both sides. Your mother’s car is almost always gone but it’s summer and it’s a different town – she wouldn’t be working full-time. Where does she go? Anywhere there’s alcohol, apparently. Naturally, her daughter would follow in her footsteps.

“And yet you choose to come out here, with your family, even though things couldn’t be much worse. Why? Relationship troubles. You’re still angry, so you’ve been ignoring everyone – you keep your phone far away from your bed, and if you were getting any texts it’d be closer. Mike tried to get ahold of you, but you haven’t responded. Finally, he just sent you a message the old-fashioned way, and the letter is sitting on your desk. It explains everything.

“Your girlfriend was easy enough to figure out. Some of the shirts you were putting away were much too revealing for your tastes – none of your other shirts are tight V-necks. You didn’t buy them. But who would? A romantic partner, obviously. Then there’s the case of the card on your dresser. Obviously from her, just look at the handwriting on the card, not to mention the little heart next to your name. If you had broken up with her, you wouldn’t have kept it; so she broke up with you. You’re obviously still upset – you brought the card here all the way from London.

“So, you’re upset. You’re angry. Your house if filled with liquor. Who wouldn’t start drinking? Someone who’d had someone close to them die under circumstances involving alcohol. Your father. He died when you were young, after crashing the car on his way back from a pub.”

John looked at Sherlock for a long, long time. He had no words to accurately describe what had just happened.

“That was… amazing,” he finally breathed.

Sherlock’s mask fell off completely. He looked at John as if he were a particularly interesting zoo animal.

“You think so?” 

“Of course it was. It was extraordinary. It was quite extraordinary,” John said, still marveling at what had just happened.

“That’s not what people normally say.”

“What do people normally say?”

“Well, it doesn’t usually get this far. I find that conversation never progresses much past, ‘That’s not possible. Faeries don’t exist’.”

John chuckled.

Sherlock got up from the bed. He slunk closer to John with long, slow steps.

“But not you… Not John Watson. What’s so special about you, John?”

“There’s nothing special about me,” John said, watching Sherlock.

“No. I wouldn’t really expect there to be anything special about you.”

Was that an insult? “Hey,” John started indignantly.

“Oh come on, John. Plain face, boring name… You’re a teenager who plays rugby and wants to go to medical school. You’re the standard,” Sherlock said dismissively, rolling his eyes.

“So then why are you here?” John asked, a little peeved.

“Quite,” he responded.

Sherlock started to make his way over to the window.

“Hold on! Are you going to come back?” John wrenched himself up from his seat to follow.

Sherlock turned back towards him. “Do you want me to?”

John had to think about that. “Yes,” he decided. “I mean, if you want to…”

Something unidentifiable flashed across the other boy’s face.

“I’ll return when I can,” he said.

And then he climbed out the window and was gone, taking his lanky limbs and his pale eyes and his unconventionally fascinating demeanor with him.

 

⁎*⁎*❉*⁎*⁎

 

John woke up far too early.

He’d gone to sleep late, probably sometime around twelve, after re-reading _The Order of the Phoenix_ for what was probably the tenth time. It’d been a long day – he’d gone into work at around seven, and he hadn’t gotten off until two. Then he’d gone for a run, and by the time he’d gone back and showered it had been four. He’d made himself dinner (Harry and Mum were nowhere in sight) and had sat down to read. Finally, he’d closed the book and checked the clock. After he’d found out the cause of the fact that he was no longer able to keep his eyes open, he’d curled up under the covers and fully expected not to return to the world of the living for at least fourteen more hours.

His alarm clock flashed the numbers 04:34.

John rubbed his eyes with his palms, groaning audibly. He turned over onto his side, re-arranging his head on the pillow and closing his –

“Shit!” he yelled, flying upwards and turning on the light.

There was Sherlock, standing next to his dresser, his back to the bed. His silhouette was outlined in both the lamplight and the glow of the moon, and his wings were glinting in that way that they always seemed to do. It was like they had come affixed with permanent sparkles, or something of that nature. Maybe he be-dazzled them. (That was one of John's more humorous theories. There were lots more. He had been thinking about Sherlock a lot, the past two days. Ever since he’d shown up in his bedroom. But not like that. Anyone would be fascinated with a faerie, wouldn’t they be? Of course. Not like that.)

But now was not the time to be asking questions like that. There were other ones to be voiced:

“What the _bloody hell_ are you doing here?”

Sherlock turned. He was holding a pair of John’s socks.

“I was bored,” he stated simply. He turned back to the dresser.

“It’s four-thirty in the morning!” John announced comically.

“What does the time have to do with anything?”

“Shouldn’t you be, I don’t know, _sleeping_?”

“Sleeping? Sleeping’s boring. And anyway, any more than four hours is completely unnecessary.”

John rubbed his face again, then put his head in his hands and closed his eyes.

“So you decided to come in and go through my drawers?”

Sherlock closed the drawer and straightened up, turning back to look at John. “Your sock index was atrocious. It made absolutely no sense. Even _I_ couldn’t figure it out. I fixed it for you.”

“Sherlock, I don’t have a _sock index_ ,” John said, in his best are-you-shitting-me-right-now-it’s-4AM-I'm-tired-and-I-want-to-sleep-for-God’s-sake voice.

Sherlock didn’t miss a beat. “Ah. That explains it.”

“What do you want?”

The faerie looked at him for a moment. He was wearing all black, with a belt slung tightly around his waist and a dark, pocketed jacket hanging off his shoulders. The belt had many different pouches attached, and hanging off of it was a long, silver-patterned sheath. Presumably, it held his katana. On top of his head was a black beanie. His eyes were wide and devious, and his mouth was slowly pulling up at the corners.

“How would you like to solve a murder?”

John looked at him for a full ten seconds.

“Goddammit. Let me get dressed.”


	5. Angelo's Brownies

“Hold on, _Sherlock_!” John called frustratedly.

Sherlock spared him a glance over his shoulder. “There’s no time to waste John! I wouldn’t have brought you along if I wasn’t sure you could at least keep up,” and he continued running.

Easy for you to say, John thought, You have _wings,_ goddammit.

Although the other boy wasn’t using them right now – which was besides the point. He was like an Olympic sprinter or something along those lines, all legs and muscle. It was interesting, because Sherlock was so thin that you’d think he’d be just as weak... but no, he was like a bloody steamroller. Maybe faeries had lighter bones, like birds? Birds. Somehow, John could see that. Maybe it was the hair, which stuck up every which way much like the ruffled feathers of some aerial creature, or maybe it was the way Sherlock’s face always seemed to display the fact that he knew he was better than everybody else.

John let out a sigh, and continued to run.

 

He met Sherlock at the end of the long road that led to the cottage.

The teenager was leaning leisurely against a tree on the outskirts of the dirt path, hands clasped together under his chin as if in prayer. When John arrived, breathless and sweaty, his eyes flashed open and he clapped his palms together, rising from his idle position with one calculatedly graceful movement. He straightened with a jump and sauntered excitedly over to John. _Sauntered excitedly_.  He was the only person John had ever met who could do both those things at once.

“Ready?” he questioned, still bouncing.

“For,” John gasped, “what, exactly?” It wasn’t as if Sherlock had explained. He had absolutely no idea what was going on.

Sherlock tittered impatiently. “To solve the murder, of course,” he said. “Now, where do you go from here if you want to get to London?”

“Wait, you want to get to London? From here?” John wasn’t quite sure he had heard right.

Sherlock crossed his arms behind his back. “Yes,” he said impatiently. “How long?”

“That’s,” John paused, counting, “Well, by train it’s five hours.”

Sherlock scowled. “Too long.”

“Well, I don’t know exactly what anybody can do about that,” John said. “You could take a plane, that might go a little quicker. Wait, would they even let you on a plane? Or in London, for that matter? How do you…” But Sherlock wasn’t listening. “Sherlock?” He was pacing back and forth by the cottage’s old red mailbox.

“No,” Sherlock said resignedly to himself, “There’s really no other option.”

John had a confused expression on his face. “What?”

Sherlock grunted in acquiescence.

“Okay - John, get into my arms.”

“ _What_?” John repeated.

Sherlock huffed. “Oh, do keep up. We have to be there much sooner than five hours from now, obviously. And travel by the ‘usual’ means isn’t an option. I’ve never ridden an airplane in my life, and besides, being cooped up with a bunch of disgusting, ordinary people in a giant metal cage 30,000 feet above the ground does not sound like something I would be able to put myself through. But we still have to fly, it’s the fastest option.”

John blinked. “And by ‘fly’, you mean…”

“Yes,” Sherlock nodded.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Sherlock, I can’t – I don’t – “

“What’s stopping you? Are you afraid? Because if that’s what you –“

John shushed him. “I just… normal people don’t do this, Sherlock! It’s a bit… well, it’s kind of unimaginable.” Mostly, he was surprised that Sherlock could actually even consider this route in the first place. He didn’t even know what they were going to London for, but, whatever it was, it seemed to be more important than the means by which they got there.

“I’m not a _normal person_ , John. I’m unimaginable to normal people.”

“Yeah, yeah I know that. God, I know that. But I don’t know how this is going to work, or if it’s even possible… How do you expect to get there faster than a machine, anyway? Wouldn’t it be easier to just get some plane tickets? For a plane?” John couldn’t believe he was actually considering this.

“I assure you, I’m very strong. And my species is much farther advanced than yours. We know how to manipulate things,” Sherlock said, still not exactly explaining anything. But there was something in his eyes. He looked excited. And decidedly devious.

“I don’t know,” John sighed. “I don’t think that I can… Sherlock? No, don’t you _dare_! FUCK –“

But they were already up in the air.

 

Flying was… different.

Humans, at least, were never meant to be able to swoop through the clouds as if they weighed no more than a bluebird. And to be experiencing something that was supposed to be impossible is the best thing was the world.

It was amazing. Dazzling. Astonishing.

Freezing.

After the first twenty minutes of almost indecipherable cursing. (“Bollocks, I can’t believe this! You are such a cock!” and “Oh my god, you utter tit!” and “Sherlock Holmes, you’re a fucking bastard, you know that! A psychopath!”

“Actually, I'm not a psychopath, I'm a _highly functioning sociopath._ And how can I be both a cock and a tit at the same time? Don’t you think that’s a bit -“

“Just SHUT UP!”)

After the initial shock, John started to enjoy the feel of the wind ruffling his hair. It was amazing. He had tears in his eyes from the strength of the airstream, but he didn’t care, because he was watching England pass him by underfoot, and it was just so wonderfully marvelous that he felt like a child on Christmas day. Which he hadn’t felt like in a long time. Too long.

His smile was so wide that it almost hurt, and the wind was filled with tinkling laughter of the absolute best kind.

(“This is amazing! You can do this anytime you want to?”

“When I’m not saving unobservant hikers from angry trees,” Sherlock said, and God, was that a joke?

“You’re amazing, you know that?”

“I thought I was a psychopath?”

“Shut up,” But this time it was fondly said.)

But after that, he started to notice how bloody cold it was outside.

His hands felt like they were about ready to fall off, and he could swear that his face was actually frozen, because he couldn’t feel his nose anymore. “Are we there yet?” John asked, voice scratchy and tired. God, he needed water.

“Yes,” Sherlock said. And John soon noticed that they were starting to decelerate, losing altitude and speed and settling into a low glide. It was a godsend. By the time they were close enough to see the individual lights of London, John was struck with a question.

“Wait, won’t they see us?”

“Who will believe them?”

He had a point.

They came down onto the top of a large apartment complex with a whistle of air and a soft thump. It could’ve been better. They landed on top of the roof lightly, like they were falling onto a cushion of wind, but sometime during the touchdown Sherlock lost his footing. They both tumbled onto the concrete in a pile of tangled limbs, and he ended up sprawled on top of John.

“Youf wnnt to gtmmup?” John said, mouth full of dark, curly hair.

“Don’t talk,” Sherlock muttered, winded. He wrenched himself upwards, devoid of any of his usual grace, and stumbled unsteadily on his feet to the wall a couple of feet away. John took a little longer, propping himself up on his elbows and surveying the location. He looked up at Sherlock, face flushed.

“So, where are we?”

Sherlock cleared his throat. He brushed himself off, trying and failing to make himself look put-together. Meanwhile, John observed at his dark curls amusedly. It was incredible how they could look both perfectly sculpted and unbelievably messy at the same time. Maybe it was magic. John didn’t understand how they worked. It seemed impossible to look like you had just jumped straight from a panting, but still be miraculously windswept. But then again, Sherlock Holmes was constantly defying his expectations.

“We’re at the Lauriston Hotel, where the latest of a seemingly related series of deaths has only recently taken place. But there’s something odd. Which is necessary; I wouldn’t investigate anything that wasn’t worth my time.”

He paused, as if waiting for John to ask. He _was_ waiting for John to ask. “What’s odd about them?” the other boy humored him.

“The investigators have decided that they’re suicides. Which all of the deaths appear to be.”

John crinkled his nose. “But why would there be more than one?”

“Well, they’re obviously not suicides, are they?”

John was silent. “So how’s the murderer doing it?”

“Pills. The human authorities have concluded that it’s some kind of foreign poison, brought over from Africa or South America or some other country. They’re correct, but only slightly. The pills are foreign to them. I, however, have seen the poison before.”  

He paused again. John sighed. “And where have you seen the pills before, Sherlock?”

“It’s the chemical mixture that we often use to put down rouge trolls.”

 

“So let me get this straight,” John said, pausing to take another bite of his pasta. They were in an Italian restaurant called Angelo’s, which was not far from the crime scene, and Sherlock was apparently staking out the front doors. John had convinced his companion that they needed to at least go somewhere that had something to drink, and Sherlock had begrudgingly agreed to the place across the street from the hotel.

Not long after John had brought up food, he’d realized that Sherlock would have to go out in public. Where there were people. And that he wasn’t exactly something that people were used to seeing.

Sherlock, however, had responded by simply standing there as his wings vanished off of their plane of existence. “Well, that settles it, then,” John had said in shock. The faerie had only grinned.

Now they were at the table by the window, John enjoying his Italian meal, Sherlock enjoying his big, steamy plate of absolutely nothing. A candle sat between them, giving off a warm glow. When they had sat down, it had mysteriously appeared in the center of the table, which Sherlock had taken without even consulting the owner of the establishment. John glanced at the candle, narrowing his eyes, but in the end he decided to ignore it. “Won’t we get in trouble?” he asked.

“No, Angelo’s brownies owe me as favor.”

“Brownies?” Images of chocolaty desserts danced in John’s mind.

Sherlock sighed. “Not the pudding. The creature! Brownies, a type of fae that aid in domestic tasks in exchange for treats. They’re interesting. Don’t interact with other faeries very much, mostly because everybody thinks they’re stupid for liking humans as much as they do… They don’t usually even ask for money, just accept honey and porridge for their help… I think the one’s here at Angelo’s live in the wine cupboards, but I’m not entirely sure.”

John thought it was amazing. “So they’re like house-keepers that you pay in honey? I want one,” he said longingly.

Sherlock turned his head from where he had been staring out the window. “Don’t call it payment, they don’t like that. They’re gifts. And they’re not house-keepers, either. They’re a quiet folk, one of the very few who put up with your race. Don’t insult them.”

Sherlock turned his head back to the window. It was quiet for a while, and then John had become even more flabbergasted than he already was when a plate of pasta appeared in front of him, seemingly out of nowhere. He glanced around, making sure none of the other diners had noticed. None of them had, so naturally, he started to eat it.

“Why are we here, anyway?”

Sherlock looked at him with an expression that communicated one thing: are you really this dumb?

“We’re here to solve a murder,” he said snappishly.

“Yeah, I know that,” John rolled his eyes. “But why are you doing it? Isn’t this a job for, I dunno, the faerie police or something?”

“I don’t trust anybody else to solve it correctly. Regular people are much too stupid.”

“You trust me,” John pointed out.

“You’re different.”

John didn’t know what to say to that.

“I’m really not,” he decided.

“Wrong.”

“Well, don’t you have someone better to take with you? I mean, I’m… well, I’m not like you. I’m not special, or magical, or anything like that.” _I’m human_. 

"You're studying medicine. I could always use a doctor's expertise."

"I'm not a doctor. Not yet. Why don't you get someone who's already finished their exams?"

“I want you,” Sherlock said, and that settled that, didn’t it? From anyone else, John was sure that he would feel awkward having those words directed at him. But Sherlock was different.

Yeah, this whole situation was different. How many times had he dealt with something like this before? How many times had anyone?

“So let me get this straight,” he swallowed. “There’s a supernatural serial killer of the loose, killing people with magical pills that are some kind of troll poison, and making the deaths look like suicides.”

“Yes,” Sherlock muttered distractedly.

John looked at his companion. “Why?”

“That’s what we’re here to figure out. I – John. John!” Sherlock’s voice rose, and he started to bounce eagerly in his seat. He’s such a child, John thought with a smirk.

“What?”

“Do you see that?”

John just stared.

“Across the street, right there! A shadow on the wall. But there’s nobody there! And look, the lights that are causing it are curved, almost like they’re shining on more than the bricks, almost like…”

“…There’s something there,” John finished.

“Exactly.”

And with that, Sherlock jumped up from his seat, bounding out from the restaurant as fast as a hummingbird. John glanced back at his pasta, mourning it. He quickly pulled on his coat. And then something caught his eye.

As he watched, a small brown creature climbed out from behind the napkins, where it looked as though it had been hiding. It had rough-looking, chestnut skin and big, green eyes that were set on a head that seemed much too large for its spindly limbs. The brownie raised on hand to its forehead and gave John a salute.

John saluted back, smiling, and then ran out the door to find Sherlock.

 

Sherlock was waiting behind a cab, watching the building like a predator stalking its prey. “He’s still there,” he whispered when John kneeled down beside him.

“So what do we do?”

“We run as fast as we can.”

They managed to get within a couple yards of the mysterious invisible creature before it started to sprint, too. “Go!” Sherlock yelled, and they both took off behind it. As soon as the creature started to run, they could see it in front of them. (John resolved to ask about that later.) Despite this, the only thing they saw was the back of a head covered in dirty brown hair, a pair of large, shoeless feet and a stout body that seemed to be about four feet tall. Whatever it was was dressed in was extremely filthy, layer upon layer of clothing that looked more like rags than anything else gracing its small body. Its long, frizzy hair was a mass of braids and leaves and various sticky-looking substances.

And it could run _fast_.

They followed it across a busy street, and Sherlock was almost run over by a bus. They skittered into an alley, turning tight corners and nearly tripping over the various drunk party-goers who littered the floors and walls. They hopped through a window and into an old, abandoned building, nearly cutting themselves open on all of the broken glass, and ran down three flights of stairs. They did all of this based on the sound of the feet in front of them and the occasional flash of dirty whatever-it-was.

“Where’s it going?” John shouted breathlessly.

Sherlock didn’t respond until they had ran through another building. Then, he stopped suddenly, John almost running straight into him. Sherlock turned around, taking him briefly by the shoulders. “The Tube!” And then he sprinted off again, John following loyally.

When they finally made it to the nearest entrance, Sherlock pulled him behind a wall. “He’s trying to find someplace underground,” the faerie gasped, “Someplace where he can get home easier - he’ll come by here any second now.”

John put his hands on his knees, breathing hard. “Why?”

Sherlock exhaled, wiping sweat from his brow. “Dwarf,” was all he said.

They both stood there, in the nook by the entrance, for what felt like forever. They didn’t speak. Sherlock kept his eyes trained mostly on the passerby, and John took the opportunity to look at the other boy. Really look at him.

He couldn’t be any more than sixteen, John had decided that during the time he’d waited for him to return. Though he looked older. More mature, possibly. Well – when he said mature, John wasn’t exactly sure what he meant. Sherlock was intelligent, sure. Incredibly so. But it was becoming more and more obvious how much of a child he was. It was amusing to watch him get excited, to have his eyes fill with life and his hands start to illustrate his enthusiasm. John didn’t think he’d ever met anyone like that before.

Well, he’d never met a faerie before.

Somehow, though, John was sure that Sherlock was different than most other member of his species. There was the way he talked about humans, for one – John felt that there was some sort of prejudice there, and that any other faerie wouldn’t be caught dead talking to him. The way Sherlock had described it, brownies were social outcasts for interacting with people like John.

Sherlock didn’t have a problem, though.

And then there were the murders. Why was he so interested? Why was he investigating them? It was certainly not a commonplace thing to do.

Just then, something brown, dirty, barefoot and small flashed past their hideout, pulling John from his thoughts.

Sherlock was off like a rocket, tackling the thing to the ground like a cat when it was halfway to the cars. John followed not far behind, watching as Sherlock wrestled with the form. He wasn’t sure if they had gotten their suspect, the tangle of bodies moving too fast for him to make out any details. Eventually, Sherlock had the smaller whats-it by the wrists on the concrete, and –

“HELP! My son! Get him off my son!”

They had attracted a crowd. John swiveled his head around just in time to see the jumble of curious onlookers part for a large, dark-skinned woman. She was holding a large, cream-colored handbag in one hand and a pair of miniature trainers in the other, and had an angry look gracing her features.

“What are you doing?!”

John glanced back at Sherlock, who was frozen in place. He looked horrified. John saw why.

The wriggling form under him was that of a human child, maybe six or seven years old. His skin was of the same tone as the woman’s and he was wearing an old chocolate-colored jacket that seemed to swallow up his skinny limbs. He was missing his shoes.

“This boy attacked my son!” The woman screamed, advancing like a mother bear. Her noise attracted the attention of a couple police officers walking nearby, and they started to make their way over, pushing through the gathered crowd.

Sherlock released the little boy and stood up, starting to back away.

“No, he’s not Victor! Haha! Ah, sorry, we were playing tag and –“

Sherlock started to run. John thought for a moment, and then ran after him.

They ran until they couldn’t run anymore, and then they collapsed inside an alleyway, laughing.

“That was brilliant,” John said, looking at Sherlock. His body was wracked with giggles once more.

Sherlock was pleased.


	6. 15 Minutes Late (to a Murder) With Starbucks

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yikes, this is almost late. I was skiing this weekend, so I didn't have access to my computer 'til today! The traffic kept me in the car for four hours later than it should've, argh. But hey - I had lots of time to write.  
> For those of you who were waiting for Gavin to show up, here ya go. Tell me what you think of him. :)

Sherlock, to John’s amazement, knew exactly where they had fled to. The faerie glanced over at the nearby shops for all of five seconds before declaring that they were near Warwick Square. John didn’t question it, though he did have to wonder how exactly a supernatural creature had managed to become a mobile map of London. The sun was coming up by then, over the city of buildings that were almost too bright to look at, glinting golden in the sudden radiance of the sky. 

They made their way over to the square, and walked to a park bench in silence. The sun washed over the leaves of the trees, alighting them, and warmed the air with a glow the color of honey. Quite frankly, it was gorgeous. John stretched his arms over his head in a yawn. He realized suddenly how exhausted he was, his muscles sapped of their strength and his legs aching as if he’d just run a mile.

Which, in all honesty, he probably had.

“So what now?” the teenager asked.

Sherlock didn’t seem nearly as tired. In fact, he was positively bouncing off the walls by comparison. Which didn’t make any sense at all, since he had apparently slept only four hours since yesterday.

“Well, we know that the murderer is a dwarf, which confirms my earlier suspicions. They’re a species largely concerned with physical tasks, dwarves – mining, construction, et cetera… though this past century, they’ve been putting their talents to things like security, some even engineering…” he trailed off.

John looked at his companion, who continued staring ahead of him. “You already knew he was a dwarf?”

“Knew, no. _Hypothesized_ , yes.”

“So why are we here?”

“No authority accepts my deductions as solid proof,” Sherlock scoffed. “Despite the fact that I’m always right.”

“Not always.”

Sherlock turned his head. “What?”

“I said, you’re not always right.”

Sherlock shook his head irritably. “I know that, but what wasn’t I correct about?”

John took a deep breath. This wasn’t a conversation that he ever felt comfortable enough to have. But then again, Sherlock was different. Somehow, he always came back to that.

Sherlock was different.

“When you ‘deduced’ me, you were almost completely right. The drinking, and Grandad, Sarah, Mike… except, my dad didn’t die on the road. He was a drunk, sure – but he never actually died because of it. He’s not… not even officially dead, really. My dad... he was in the army. We… Got a phone call one night… he’d gone into a danger zone to see if they could get anyone out safe, and after he walked into the zone… it was bombed. Nobody heard anything else. We buried an empty coffin,” John’s voice was sad. He didn’t look at Sherlock as he said it; he focused instead on the grass next to his trainers, willing his voice to keep steady. He looked at the small mushrooms growing amongst the green blades. They weren’t arranged in the shape of a circle – he checked.

Sherlock was silent for a long time. John was glad. He didn’t want pity, didn’t want the typical “I’m sorry.” People who said that had nothing to be sorry for, and they certainly didn’t need to apologize. It was John’s problem, and yes, it was very sad, but it didn’t make him something to be consoled. He didn’t need that. He’d had enough of it for a lifetime.

He needed understanding.

And Sherlock’s silence was beautiful.

Eventually, John recovered. “So, why don’t you show me what else you’ve got?”

Sherlock wrenched his head up, a bit taken aback at John’s sudden speech. “Show you?”

“Y’know – _deduce_ ,” John said. He pointed to a passing jogger. “Deduce her.”

“My intellect isn’t a parlor trick,” the other boy said stiffly.

“Oh c’mon, I know you’re dying to show off. Make up for the mistake you made with my life story.”

Sherlock gave John a long, scrutinizing look before speaking, but when he opened his mouth, the words flowed out in a fast stream. “She’s training for a triathlon, her third or fourth of that kind. She lived in Bristol, but just moved in with her boyfriend of three years. She works at a perfume company, where she is the graphic design artist who fine-tunes the models. She –“

John cut him off. “That’s good. Miss! Oi, Miss!” He got up, temporarily forgetting the ache in his bones and running after the woman. Sherlock tentatively followed.

She stopped when they got near, pulling her ear buds out in confusion. “Do I know you?” She squinted her emerald-green eyes, lips flattening into a thin line.

“No, no,” John said, “My, erm, friend and I are taking a survey. Would you mind answering a question for us?”

She glanced at Sherlock, dressed entirely in black with an obvious weapon hanging from his waist. “Sorry, I have to finish my run…” She gulped.

“That’s actually what we wanted to ask you about,” John said sweetly. “Do you run competitively?”

“Uh, I’m training for my fourth triathlon, and speaking of that, I really –“

“Where are you employed?”

“Erm, I do ads for Crown, the, uh, perfume… Listen, I’ve got to –“

“Just one more,” John smiled. “What’s your relationship status?”

This time, she stared at him, her eyes pulling away from where they’d been flickering to Sherlock. “Look kid, I’m flattered, but you’re like, in college,” she flipped her long, ginger ponytail over her shoulder. “And I have a boyfriend,” the woman sounded pretty annoyed.

“No, it’s for the survey, I didn’t mean -“ John spluttered.

“Whatever,” She said, coldly shaking her head, putting her headphones back in, and jogging away.

Sherlock’s voice came over his shoulder. “At least you didn’t ask her where she lived.”

John chuckled, turning back from the retreating form of the jogger. “So what now?” he yawned.

Sherlock fiddled with his coat a bit, then his belt, and finally just crossed them behind his back. He looked at John, and then in front of him, and then where the jogger had retreated to, the buildings, John again, and then –

“Well, I’d like to see the newest corpse, before it gets too cold,” he suggested.

John jumped in alarm. Or, he would’ve jumped, if he’d had any energy. “There’s been another?”

“Of course there has! We chased the dwarf _away_ from the building – he wouldn’t have retreated unless he’d already finished the job.”

John was still. He wasn’t sure he wanted to do anything but sleep; he was really tired.

“If we’re lucky, we can get there before Lestrade gets back to the yard,” Sherlock said.

“Lestrade?”

“Detective Inspector,” Sherlock answered, throwing his long arms over his head in a stretch. “Not nearly as good as I am, of course.”

John’s internal battle dwindled. Finally, a victor reared its head.

“Alright. Alright. But can we grab a coffee first?”

“Coffee?”

 

John could not believe that Sherlock hadn’t ever had a Starbucks.

All that time memorizing the streets, and he’d never once ducked into one of the most popular franchises in the world? The other boy had said simply that he’d never saw any reason to try one, which John was appalled at, because one never needed a particular reason to drink coffee. He himself very nearly lived off of the stuff.

John paid for their drinks – two white chocolate mochas – with a wrinkled ten pound note that he dug out of one of his pockets. And then they’d made haste to move on, as Sherlock’s very questionable choice of wears was attracting more attention than John thought was wise. The teenager at the counter had been wary to present them with their drinks, scared that the tall one with the demeanor reminiscent of Edgar Allen Po would chop him in half if he didn’t like his coffee.

They paid and left the shop, and Sherlock darted through the crowds just as he had before the sun had come out. He scared passerby as they tried to make their way to work, narrowly avoided another bus, and slopped a fair amount of coffee down his front and onto the pavement. Every once in a while, he stopped to gesture impatiently to John and shout, “Faster!”

If not for the caffeine, John wouldn’t have been able to keep up.

Eventually, they arrived at the Lauriston Hotel. There were a number of police vehicles lined up outside, and the officers themselves were swarming the entrance. Sherlock darted nimbly up the steps, ignoring them altogether until one of them moved to bar his path.

“Hold up. You got a room here?”

John came up behind them, startled to find Sherlock replying in an amazingly accurate, awfully believable American accent.

“Yup, me and my brother Mike are on vacation. London’s awesome! You guys' accents are so-oo cool. I wish I lived here! Anyway, I can’t reach his cell. What _happened_?”

John was, quite frankly, taken aback. It was as if Sherlock was an entirely different person. His eyes had lost their devious glint, the picture of innocence and earnestness. His smile was blinding, and the concerned expression that he wore after delivering the last line was enough to make anyone realize how worried he was for his brother. There was no way that Sherlock wouldn’t be let through the doors, no way in –

“What’s that on your belt? Is that a sword? You can’t take a weapon in here! Where the heck did ya get that thing?” He’d noticed the sheath resting against Sherlock’s thigh.

The façade dropped as easily as the boy had picked it up. “Damn.”

Then, Sherlock’s eyes latched onto something through the doorway. Abruptly, he pushed past the man at the door, causing him to shout, “Hey!” and put his hands toward his own holster.

“It’s alright,” said a voice, “he’s with me.”

The officer frowned. “Look, d’ya see that thing? I don’t think that’s very legal. Suspicious, too. Who is 'ee, anyways?”

“He’s with me,” the other man repeated, more sternly this time. John could practically feel the authority radiating off of him.

“You can go back to your post,” he said gruffly. And when the man still didn’t move: “Oh, for fuck’s sake, out!”

Sherlock had noticed him when he had strode towards the doorway, a long coat fanning out around him as he walked, each step filled with purpose. He carried with him a sharp sort of nobility that was reminiscent of the generals in war movies. This was despite the fact that he looked ten times as exhausted as John felt. The five-o’clock shadow that dusted his jawline was toeing the line between haven’t-shaved and trying-to-grow-a-beard. If he wasn’t wearing such nice clothes, the boy would’ve thought he was a hermit.

His hair was silver, despite the fact that the man couldn’t have been older than his late-twenties; but it suited him, somehow. His eyes were a deep brown, almost black, lined with bags that showed his lack of sleep. He was attractive, even _John_ could see that. But his face was tired, prematurely giving off that midlife-type aura that made everything seem bland to the taste. And smell like an office supply store.

“Sherlock,” the man said, nodding to him. “You _would_ have heard.”

“I assume you already know what’s going on, Lestrade?” he said it like a challenge.

Lestrade sighed. “Yeah, lab test from FR just confirmed…” He put his hand up to his temple in exasperation, voice dropping. “Troll juice, though? I dunno how they’re getting at it, what with all the pixies –“

“Hold on,” John interrupted. Lestrade glanced at him in alarm, as if he’d only just noticed him standing there. Probably had, poor bloke.

John pointed at the DI, and then at Sherlock. “You two… pixies… troll…” He turned to Sherlock. “He knows?”

Lestrade did the same thing afterwards, staring at John for a long second before turning to Sherlock. “ _He knows_?”

Sherlock nodded at them impatiently, addressing John. “Lestrade works for the Fae-Human division in the Realms, and he goes back and forth between there and London to make sure that any threat to the security of our rather secret community is taken care of.”

Lestrade huffed. “You make it sound easy.”

John was very interested. He never would’ve guessed that there were other people who knew about fae. “So you’re like, a double agent then? Like Vesper Lynd in _Casino Royale_?”

“That’s a very high compliment, but I’m a bloke,” Lestrade smiled. “Although I’m afraid it’s a lot less glamorous than a James Bond movie. Health benefits are basically nonexistent, for one, and you wouldn’t believe the cramping I get in my wings after –“

“Wait, you’re a faerie?” Faeries in the Met?

“Well, yeah.”

“Wow. _Wow_. Here I was thinking you’re all like Sherlock,” John said in wonder.

Sherlock was odd, he was eccentric, he was amazing – and apparently, he was all of those things in the magical world too. John had thought that all fae were just as alien as his newfound companion; and he was both intrigued and astonished to find himself wrong.

“Oh, God no,” Lestrade gawked. “If everyone I knew was like that little bastard, I’d have offed myself a long time ago.”

John barked a laugh, and at Sherlock’s glare, Lestrade offered a half-hearted “… no offence.”

“Are you two done?” the boy asked in a monotone.

“Not nearly,” John smiled.

Sherlock glared. “We _do_ have a murder to investigate,” he huffed.

“Truer words have never been spoken. I can give you ten minutes.”

Sherlock was past them in less than a second, slowing only to shove his coffee cup unceremoniously into Lestrade’s hand, and then to call a quick, “Come, John!” before his curly head disappeared up the staircase.

 

Lestrade and John decided to take the elevator.

“John, John Watson,” John shook his free hand.

“Greg Lestrade,” the DI answered.

After a moment, Lestrade spoke up: “So, where’d you meet him? I mean, I think you’ve gathered already that he doesn’t really have friends. I haven’t met anyone who can put up with him.”

“He saved me. Saved my life,” John said.

“What, like on a case?”

“No, from a ‘faerie ring’… came out swinging a sword, blew some sparkles at the dryad thing… I’d be covered in bark and stuck in the ground if it weren’t for him,” John relayed the story with awe in his voice.

Lestrade nodded thoughtfully, with a kind of puzzled fascination.

As far as he knew, Sherlock Holmes had never voluntarily interacted with anyone, human or fae, ever before.

 

Sherlock practically dragged John out of the elevator. “The body’s this way,” he whined impatiently.

Lestrade veered off in a different direction with a promise to come back. John let himself be led to a room off of the east wing, on the outer edges of the building, where the sun shone into the corridors and lit up the (rather ugly) wallpaper. The doorway to the room was blocked with yellow tape, but that didn’t shop Sherlock – and neither did the forensics that were swarming the hallway. They all regarded him with dirty looks and cold expression, but made no move to stop him.

One of them – a dark-haired, hook-nosed man – seemed to take particular offence.

“Oh, it’s _you_ ,” he drawled. John looked at him, trying to figure out what he meant by that.

Sherlock, meanwhile, ignored the man, favoring the corpse in front of him.

John ducked under the tape and stood awkwardly off to the side, unsure of what to do with himself. Sherlock was bent over the body, fiddling with the clothing, checking the position it had died in. It was a woman; she looked to be about forty. Her long blonde tresses fanned out around her head like a halo, and she wore a pale pink sundress, along with strappy sandals and a dark overcoat. On the floor next to her hand were the letters FAE. John squinted at it, wondering how it could’ve gotten there. He realized that the woman must’ve carved it into the floor with her fingernails. A shudder ran through his body.

He decided to stay out of the way until Sherlock was done doing whatever he was doing. He took a sip of his coffee, and then made what must have been an awfully amusing expression, as it was cold.

“Come to look at another body, _detective_? Are you sure it’s okay with Mummy? Or is it past your bedtime already?” the hook-nosed man sneered.

 _Really?_ John thought. It was apparent that the man, whomever he was, had seen Sherlock before. And he clearly held some sort of grudge, although John couldn’t see what Sherlock had done to warrant such a coldness.

But there was obviously some history between them.

The other boy wasn’t saying anything, though. Did that mean that he was partly in the wrong? Then again, John wasn’t even sure if he’d heard or not. Maybe he’d just heard it all before. The thought made John both extremely sad and extremely angry. Whatever Sherlock had done, it still was just plain cruel to pick on him like that. Hell, John was a teenager, and he behaved better than this. He coughed pointedly.

The man turned his sneer around. “What are _you_ doing here? Hang on – don’t tell me. You’re with the freak?”

“He has a name,” John said timidly. For a split second, Sherlock’s hands froze where they were rifling through the victim’s pockets.

“What’re you, his boyfriend? How much did he pay you?”

“What? No. Sherlock’s my friend.”

The man laughed out loud. “Yeah, and I’m the Queen of England.”

John’s fists clenched. He gave the man a tight-lipped smile.

The man looked past them, towards the woman lying on the ground.

“ _Fae_. Maybe a _buddy_? Her _name_? We should check it out…” he said, sarcasm dripping from every syllable..

Sherlock scoffed. “Yes, thank you for your input. John, you play rugby – please put the human out of his misery.”

The man chuckled to himself. “The Human’? You say it like you’re not. Then again, you're more like a machine, aren't you?” He looked at John one final time. “ _Friend_ , you said. I think you meant _attack dog_.” And then he smirked and sauntered away.

“God, who was that guy?” John growled, after checking to make sure he was really gone.

“The bane of my existence,” Sherlock said darkly. He turned back to the body for a moment. “What do you think?”

“Hmm?”

“The body. What’s your prognosis?”

“I told you, Sherlock, I’m not a doctor.”

“You’ve studied medicine. And you’re interning as an EMT.”

“I’m not even going to ask how you knew that.”

There was a sound behind them. Lestrade walked into the room, clearing his throat. “Right, it’s been fifteen minutes. I’m going to need everything you got.”

“John?”

John sighed. “Hold this,” he said, shoving his coffee into Lestrade’s hand. Lestrade looked at it for a second, and then took a sip. He immediately grimaced, repulsed. “That’s bloody awful, that is.”

With a groan, John knelt down next to Sherlock. He looked at the woman on the ground, and then went to work examining her. He checked her clothes, her makeup, looked into her mouth and eyes, and studied her skin. He wasn’t entirely sure what he was looking for, and definitely not sure what he was doing.

“Well, it’s self-administered – she’s got the powder on her hands…,”

“Think!”

John looked back at her, eyes latching onto the words on the floor. “She scratched a word into the floor – ‘fae’. Like the dwarf.”

“And what does that mean?”

“….she knew,” John realized. Sherlock smiled.

“Exactly.”

“Sherlock?” Lestrade called.

Sherlock straightened up, brushing off his knees. “I could list a dozen things about her, but I’ll skip to the important bits. First, she’s human.”

“No cloak?”

“No cloak. If she were using magic to retain this form, it would’ve evaporated when she died.”

Lestrade crossed his arms. “But how do we know she isn’t being concealed by someone else?”

Sherlock rolled his eyes. “Honestly. We’d see the traces. Magic can’t help but leave seams.”

“Alright. What else?”

“She knew.”

“About…?”

“Us. Faeries. Did you even look at the body?”

Lestrade walked towards them. “Not personally, no,” he confessed. “But how? How did she know?”

“We don’t know. But she was warning us.”

John got up. “So they’re not random.”

“No. Whoever the victims are, they personally attracted the attention of our murderer. Which narrows the field down considerably.”

 

Sherlock wanted to do more investigating, but John managed to convince him to save it for a day when he hadn’t left in the middle of the night without telling his family where he was going. And when Sherlock had started to get out his wings to take him home, he’d taken him by the shoulders and told him, very aggressively, that they were taking a train.


	7. Staircases and Dust

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1000 hits for a story that the author can't even manage to update on time? Wow!  
> (Heh, yeah. Sorry about that. But I'm going to try to get another chapter out this Sunday, and this chapter is extra long, so... yeah. Whoops.  
> P.S. Thanks guys - seriously, I'm extremely flattered.)

"So, erm, I guess I'll see you soon?"

They stood next to the ticket booth, passengers fluttering around them like twittering birds. The chatter of the early morning crowd surrounded them, a bubble of noise among the light sunshine and the crisp wind of summer. John held out his hand for Sherlock to shake. Sherlock just stared at it.

"What, you've never shaken anyone's hand before?" John teased.

"No, don't be stupid. I was just wondering why you thought we had reached a parting of the ways," Sherlock answered.

John wrinkled his eyebrows. "You're... coming on the rail?"

"As I said before - don't be stupid."

Sherlock paid for their tickets, and John grudgingly let him, as he had used his only funds to buy them coffee. However, he did deign to ask where Sherlock had gotten the money, when he purchased tickets for a train that offered them their own private coach.

"I spend a lot of time in London."

"Why?" John asked, forgetting to keep walking.

"I prefer your population to the alternative. Although it’s really not any better."

Oh, okay.

As it turned out, having Sherlock on the train did nothing for anyone. They had barely been on for fifteen minutes, and he'd already exited the carriage six times to walk around and tell all of the other passengers what was in their bags, why they were taking it, and why they were stupid for doing so.

"Sherlock, just sit still," groaned John, dozing in his seat. Sherlock was lying on the luggage racks over their heads, half-falling off as he sprawled his long limbs over the bars.

"I wouldn't have come along if I had known it would be this boring, John," Sherlock said with a whine.

"Sleep," John suggested.

"That's worse."

"I dunno, Sherlock, we have," John halfheartedly checked his watch, "five hours and forty minutes left. Can't you find something to do?"

"There's _nothing_ to do."

"What do you usually do when you're bored?"

"Smoke."

"Really? I wouldn't have thought you the type,” said John, going into concerned-doctor mode.

Sherlock said nothing.

"They'll kill you, you know," John pressed.

"Really, John. It's not as if I'm not going to die someday anyway."

John grunted, but he had nothing to say to that. He changed the subject.

"So. Tell me about faeries."

"What about them?"

John hadn't thought that far ahead.

"Ah, well, how many of you are there?"

"Too many."

“Err, where do you guys live, exactly? Like, under any old rock, or just by the coast? Not in the city, right?”

“We live in the Realms. We could blend in on this plane if we wanted to, but most faeries…. Well, they don’t like your kind very much. You’re… frankly, you’re stupid. Like cattle to us.”

“And you?”

“Mm?”

“Do you hate us that much?”

“Oh, don’t take it personally, John. I hate everyone.”

“Me?”

“Would I be here otherwise?”

They slipped into silence.

“Will I ever get to see your world? I want to know what it’s like.”

“Yes. Soon.” Sherlock appeared lost in thought. He bit his lip.

“Really?”

“Next weekend?”

“Yes. Oh, God _yes_.”

 

Sherlock sat still for all of twenty more minutes before John tired of watching him descend into madness. He looked at him with a sigh. The faerie was slouching in his seat, eyes flickering to and from the window. The light shone on his messy curls, highlighting the ringlets and lighter strands of dark hair. As if it wasn’t picturesque enough, he was staring into the sky above, fiddling with his shirt and tapping out a beat with his long, thin fingers.

“Sherlock,” John started, “why don’t you go out? Stretch your wings above the train? Preferably _before_ I strangle you.”

Sherlock was out of the car before he could say another word.

John fell into a doze, nodding off with his head on his shoulder. He had half-vivid daydreams of flying above the rail with Sherlock, feeling the wind nip at his face and hands, hearing the tinkle of the faerie’s laughter ride the wind they trailed behind in their wake.

He dreamed of having wings of his own.

Sherlock swept back into the carriage thirty minutes before they arrived at Grandfather’s cottage. They kept up a quiet conversation, laughing and joking. John taught him how to play Switch, Rummy, and Old Maid with a wrinkled pack of cards that Sherlock swiped from a woman who had been sleeping in the next carriage over.

When they finally arrived back, there weren’t any words exchanged between the two.

Just a smile.

 

⁎*⁎*❉*⁎*⁎

 

The week passed by very, very slowly and very, very fast at the same time.

John went in to work half-heartedly, and was given a scolding on more than a few occasions for being caught daydreaming. But there was no way that it could have been helped. His mind was most certainly not on anything that he was doing – how could it be, when the promise of something so unbelievable magical loomed over him?

Both his mother and Harriet called him out on it, but he mostly ignored them. He said simply that he had ‘met someone’.

On Friday night, John had to force himself to go to sleep. He put on his pajamas and read for a little while, trying to calm his nerves, which were already stirring. He hadn’t even seen Sherlock yet, so why were there butterflies in his stomach? He didn’t have a very good answer to that.

On Saturday morning, he awoke with the sun shining brightly and cheerfully onto his face. He went downstairs to make some toast, opening all the shades. Harry’s door was still closed when he passed it – sleeping, then. He picked out some tea, sang some weird pop song as he walked around the kitchen, and smiled to himself. While he waited for the water to boil, and the bread to toast, he decided to go get dressed – and found that he already had a visitor.

“You do know we have a front door, right?”

Sherlock was leaning against the windowsill, inspecting the drapes. Today he had on a light blue button down and a pair of plain dark skinny jeans. He looked a bit more put-together than he usually did, but John didn’t know exactly why. Perhaps it was the shirt. (Which made his eyes shine an even brighter shade of whatever color they were. Sometimes they were minty green, other times they were silver, and on days like today there were a clear, beautiful shade of blue.)

“No time to waste,” said the faerie, walking towards him.

“I’m getting dressed first,” John announced. “And I have to eat breakfast.”

“Hurry up, then!” Sherlock stood there, looking edgy.

“I’m going to _get dressed_ now,” said John, pronunciating each world clearly and slowly.

Sherlock made a motion with his long fingers, conveying something along the lines of, _off you go, then_.

“Which means you have to leave,” John clarified.

“Oh.”

John shoved him away from the window and towards the door. “Make yourself some toast or something. I’m boiling some water. Be quiet though, Mum’s sleeping, so is Harry… and put your wings away, yeah? Just in case.”

Sherlock magicked away his wings, letting himself be steered from the room. No sooner had John opened the door that Harriet stumbled out of her own bedroom, rubbing her eyes.

“Morning, Johnny,” she said. Her eyes widened when she noticed Sherlock. “Who’s _he_?”

“Oh, uh, Harry, this is Sherlock. He’s a – he’s a friend,” John sputtered, immediately taking his hands off of the faerie’s shoulders.

“Was he in your _room_?” Harry asked interestedly. “Friend, you say?”

“Yeah, friend,” John said pointedly. “He’s here to pick me up. Going out. Don’t know when I’ll be back,” John slammed his door shut.

“ _Sherlock_ ,” Harriet commented, testing it out. “That’s different. Posh.”

The boy shot her a look.

Harry steered him around, pushing him towards the kitchen.

“So, how’d ya meet my brother?”

 

John put on the first things he saw, scrambling to get back to the kitchen before the house was set on fire. He brushed his teeth in a rush, barely even glancing in the mirror. He accidently put on his trainers before his trousers, and embarrassedly unlaced them, not even bothering to tie them up a second time. When he finally raced downstairs, he found Harry at the table, enjoying a bowl of cereal, and Sherlock standing on top of the counter, looking into their spice cabinet. John wasn’t fazed by this, and neither was Harry, it seemed.

“Ready to go?” Sherlock asked distractedly, turning his head when the other boy walked into the room.

“He’s rude, that one,” said Harriet, looking up at him as well. “Told me I don’t have a girlfriend ‘cause my face ‘isn’t symmetrical.’”

“That’s only one of the reasons,” came a muffled answer. “There’s also the fact that you never take any relationship seriously, and that you have trust issues that stem so deep that it’s nearly impossible for you to connect with another human being. And don’t get me started on your self-confidence, because –“

“See?”

“Sherlock, that’s enough,” John said dazedly. He had no idea how Harriet wasn’t using the faerie as a punching bag right now, and he did not want to test his luck.

“Why do you always go for the funny ones?” Harry suddenly asked.

“What?” asked John, stumbling over to the toaster and starting to butter his breakfast.

“I can never understand it… you always bring home all of these loonies…. You’re like a magnet. You pull all these psychos in…”

“Like you?”

Harry stuck up her middle finger with the hand that wasn’t spooning her breakfast into her mouth.

“Right,” John said, turning away, mouth full of toast, “we’ll be going now.” He opened up the refrigerator and took a sip of milk straight from the carton.

Sherlock jumped down from the counter, landing gracefully onto the tile. Together, they walked towards the front door.

“Have fun, kids! Don’t stay out too late! Use protection!” called Harry.

“Piss off!”

 

“So, how does this work?”

They were walking down the road now, towards wherever Sherlock was planning on taking them. The faerie was skipping quickly ahead, gliding through the air like he was already flying. John hurried to keep up, running and huffing as he tried to finish his toast.

The trees blocked out the sun with their leaves, shading them both in a green light that was both cold and warm at the same time. Sherlock stopped, abruptly, right at the edge of their cluster. John nearly ran into him at the sharp deceleration, but he quickly steadied himself, looking towards the other boy curiously. Sherlock was digging through his pockets, pulling things out and throwing them towards the ground without a care. He was obviously searching for something.

Finally, he seemed to find it. He straightened up, brushing himself off.

“Eat this.”

Sherlock shoved a messily wrapped little package under John’s nose. It looked to be about as small as a jawbreaker, and it was covered in a thin sort of papery cloth. John accepted it and inspected the tiny ball with narrowed eyes.

“What is it?”

“Your ticket to the Realms.”

Vague, as usual. John stared at it.

“Is it safe?”

“Of course it is. I _made_ it. Just eat!” Sherlock said impatiently.

John still wasn’t convinced. “You made it?”

“If I’m poisoning you, you’ll be dead before it matters.” Sherlock glared.

John took a final look, and then shrugged his shoulders. He unwrapped the small candy. It was perfectly round and a bright, bubbly pink color. It was swirled with white and purple, too, and it felt soft and chewy.

“Eh, what the hell,” he said, popping it into his mouth.

At first, nothing happened. John just stood there, not feeling any different. The candy had the texture of caramel, but it was pleasantly fruity, and with it came inexplicable flashes of spring and summer. John saw the sun, and the flowers, and the cool touch of a sparkling lake. Except – that was the flavor. It was summer flavored, somehow.

It was so full of zest that John almost had to close his eyes as the feeling overwhelmed him. He swallowed and licked his lips.

“So, what’s it supposed to –“

Sherlock shushed him.

And suddenly, everything started to change. The world started to morph into something entirely different, yet very familiar. His vision took on a blue hue, and something sparkled near his feet. The blue intensified, blinding him, flashing his vision like a laser. And then everything started to get longer. The trees grew up, up, up, until he could no longer see the sun caress the sky; the clouds seemed to shoot away from him, rising up to the heavens as if they were buoys in a raging ocean of blue. The rocks and the blades of grass grew sharper, more defined; and the light wind of before was suddenly raging past his ears in gusts.

When the blue cleared, John looked up and saw someone towering over him.

“No way,” he breathed. For the world was suddenly much bigger than he was used to.

Everything was humungous, looming, and terrifyingly large. It was as if he had entered a different world. It was all as he remembered, sure, but – it wasn’t. It was like the difference between 2% milk and 1% milk; something indescribably altered.

“Sherlock?!” John shouted upwards.

The giant grinned at him. He reached down and placed his hand on the ground next to John.

John climbed on, sitting down in the curve of the giant’s palm. Sherlock raised his hand, giving John a sort of ride upwards. He held the other boy up to his face to talk to him, and John was immediately assaulted by a pair of eyes that he saw in such high-definition that he nearly fainted. He could see every highlight, every gleam; he wasn’t used to seeing things so closely. It was remarkable.

“What do you think?” Sherlock grinned.

“It’s amazing!” It was. “You joining me?”

“Be right down.”

Sherlock lowered his hand again, and John jumped off. He sat down on a rock that – had he been his usual size – he could’ve used as a skipping stone.

The other boy shrank down to meet him, whirling and twisting in his own sea of blue. Finally, he stepped carefully over to John and raised his eyebrows.

“Ready?”

“Hell. Yes.”

 

Sherlock led them through the forest. He kept a quick pace, and John found it extremely hard to keep up with him. The journey was much too amazing for him to hurry.

He saw leaves and branches as easily as if he was looking at them through a magnifying glass, and examined the dew that had settled on the moss and roots of the forest with an awe that nothing could interrupt. Luckily, Sherlock seemed patient enough with him, and whenever John stopped to examine something in particular, he’d recite the specifics of the plant or the phenomena, and John would look at him like there was nothing in the world that was more important.

They had walked for a quite a while, so long that the sun had almost made a home in the center of the sky, when Sherlock started to lead them down a smaller trail. It was well-worn and obviously well-known, and it wrapped around bushes and stones until it finally seeped into a collection of large boulders that were nestled among the trees.

The rocks were dusted green with moss and chiseled with weather, and they reminded John of a line of giant, bumpy toads. The faerie skipped between them, running his fingers over their cool surface, and he led John to a spot in the middle, where they were entirely surrounded within the circle.

John lifted up a curtain of ivy and made his way to the interior, where Sherlock stood waiting.

“This is dangerous,” he said. “I’ve cloaked you, so they won’t be able to tell you’re human. But if you give anything away… well, we don’t want that to happen.”

“Alright,” John said, blood pumping.

Sherlock gave a stiff nod, and then knelt down in the dirt. John bent down beside him, hands on his knees.

“So, how do we get there?”

Sherlock didn’t respond. He stared intently at the ground for a moment, and then fumbled inside his pockets once again. John watched in silence.

This time, the faerie pulled out a small, velvet pouch. He untied its seams with a surgeon’s care, and then shook some of the contents into his palm. It looked like sand, John noted. He remembered the Dryad Mishap, suddenly, flashing back to when Sherlock had blown a different powder at the stump.

This dust wasn’t blue, though; it was white and pure, seeming to almost be made of untainted light. It gleamed sterling, and as Sherlock lifted it to his lips, it shone as bright as a nova. The faerie let out a quiet, soft breath, his cupid bow lips forming a perfect ‘O’. The dust flew into the wind as if it had been waiting to be let free, and it settled onto the dirt at Sherlock’s feet in a perfect circle.

He rose slowly, and then began to say something in a tongue that John didn’t understand.

“ _Lig do na Ríthe agus na Banríona elder treoir a thabhairt dom, Fae nó cara, mar taisteal mé go dtí Sídhe, an saol eile, an réimse ina bhféadfaidh mo Magick fháil tá sé ar siúl, agus beidh muid reunite._ ”

When Sherlock was finished, the circle started to glow. Actually glow this time, not just appear to – it was an embodiment of purity, shining a clear, clean blue that seemed to slice through the entire world so thoroughly that there wasn’t anything it couldn’t break - surely.

John could swear that the ground started to shake.

And suddenly, the earth within the gleaming outline melted away, leaving in its wake an opening into the ground below, dark, damp, and chilling.

John walked carefully over to it, not remembering the time at which he had backed away. He looked into the depths, struggling to see within the black. Just noticeable, shrouded in shadow, was a staircase. An old, stone, stairway that wrapped itself around the walls of the circular pit. It seemed to go on forever, and John gulped.

“Down we go,” said Sherlock brightly, sticking the pouch back into the pocket of his skinny jeans.

He stood, tall and infallible, next to the pit, giving John a grin that was both hesitant and encouraging. “You go first.”

“Are you sure?” John fiddled with his jacket, glancing at the hole.

“I’ll be right behind you.”

Sherlock would be right behind him. He’d be alright. It’s just a staircase. Okay. Let’s go, Watson. You can do this.

You can do this.

John lowered himself slowly into the hole, his feet finding a place on the stone. It was solid enough. He felt along the walls, trying to find something to grip. But the walls were slimy to his touch, and he quickly pulled them back, disgustedly wiping them onto his jeans.

“Turn on the light, for God’s sake,” came an exasperated voice from behind him.

“The light…?”

Even though he couldn’t see anything, John could practically hear Sherlock rolling his eyes.

Soon afterwards, there was a small _click_ , and the room was bathed in a white light. The walls glowed with square pads of electricity, buzzing warmly. John saw now that the cavern walls were covered in moss and water, which came, no doubt, from them being underground. It was interesting, the combination of twenty-first century lighting and a staircase that looked as if it had come from the medieval ages. A bit funny, really.

“Why don’t you have an elevator, if you have lightbulbs?”

“Budget cuts,” answered Sherlock.

The staircase wasn’t really that long. It had only appeared so with the lack of illumination. Soon enough, the pair was at the bottom. When John reached the foot of the spiral, he was pushed roughly out of the way as Sherlock darted to the door directly across from it. He pushed away some ivy, placing his hands on the old, splintery wood. John stood behind him as he pushed open the door.

And they came out in a meadow.

“What the…” John looked around.

The hills were the color of the setting sun, and the surrounding mountains held the warm hue of honey; the sky gleamed a color that John couldn’t understand. It wasn’t something he’d ever seen before, and it seemed to beyond the spectrum that he’d so far experienced. It was purple, and blue, and chartreuse, and gold… it was none of them and all of them at once. Whatever it was, it gleamed with tiny pinpricks of light, the shape of diamonds and the color of the dust that had brought them there.

The meadow itself was filled with flowers that weren’t flowers, not really – they were much too beautiful to be. Surrounding it were old, tall trees that showered blossoms and rays of light onto the undergrowth. Everything was green and leafy and bright and shining and -

It was breathtaking.

“We… we were just… but we were just underground,” said John, looking around.

“Were we?”

“Yes. We were. We were under the earth, and now we’re… not.”

“We were passing through Realms, John. We weren’t anywhere. We didn’t exist on any plane.”

“And now we’re in _this place_ ,” breathed the other boy.

“Yes,” Sherlock agreed.

“Where are we, exactly?” asked John.

“ _Sídhe_ ,” Sherlock said, throwing his arms wide, as if to illustrate to land. “Realm of the Faeries, a place of Magick… and home to some of the most arrogant, pig-headed, stupidly self-important beings I have ever come to know.”

“How could you hate this place?” John watched as a flying creature he had no name for flew among the blooms. It had curled horns, large, bulbous eyes, and long legs that brushed the plants as it glided past.

Sherlock didn’t answer.

“So, where are we going to go first?”

“I was thinking that we could visit the dwarf territories,” Sherlock said tentatively.

John pulled away. “You brought me here to investigate the murder.” It wasn’t a question.

“… Yes,”

“Of course you did,” said John, laughing. “Well, we’d better get going, huh?”

Sherlock seemed surprised, and so he just stood there for a second, looking at John. He was scrutinizing him in that way that was becoming all too familiar – as if there was something puzzling about him. As if John was some sort of scientific anomaly; as if he was a new species or a fantastical creation. Which didn’t make sense to John, because he wasn’t anything special. He wasn’t something that deserved that kind of a look. And yet he managed to puzzle Sherlock Holmes, who was probably the most intelligent person in the world. _Both_ worlds.

How?

“You lead the way,” John cleared his throat.

“Yes,” said Sherlock, shaking his head and seeming to snap out of it. He set off towards the trees opposite them.

John bumped his friend’s shoulder playfully.

“Would you have brought me if we weren’t chasing a dwarf?”

“Sure.”

“Liar.”

They both smiled, and as the two left the doorway, it melted slowly back into the rock behind it.

**Author's Note:**

> As of now, I am unsure of the length this story will reach; however, it will probably be pretty darn long.  
> If you enjoyed this story, I would absolutely love to hear what you have to say. Comments make me write faster! And if you leave one, I just might marry you.  
> [Be a doll and check out my tumblr?](http://automatonicdragon.tumblr.com/)


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